Wednesday’s Child: An Unsavory Metaphor
My subject today is mildly unpleasant, but since it had fascinated me for quite some time I now decided to take the plunge. Besides, if a metaphor is said to consist of the tenor, to which certain attributes are ascribed, and the vehicle, whose attributes are highlighted in the exposition, then it’s only the motion of the vehicle that might make the gentle reader feel nauseous. The tenor may likewise be sickening, but it is all around us. It is the tenor of the times.
A Russian – of course it had to be a Russian, what else! – by the name of Alexei Podnebesny is perhaps the world’s most famous “incel,” short for involuntary celibate. All my reading on the subject, incidentally, has not answered why he and his acolytes the world over insist on the “involuntary” component of their philosophy, since for all appearances their stance is not only voluntary, but considered and deliberate. “Volcels” is what they should call themselves, though of course that would absolve the world of the charge of oppression.
The charge of oppression against the world is the central pivot of the incel philosophy. What Podnebesny argues is that females have monopolized sexual relations, acquiring the collective power to deprive males or, alternatively, to indulge them in pursuit of their own ends. The putative ends, predictably, are wholly material and could be called maney, a conflation of “man” with “money” and a term I could gift to Podnebesny to lend his theory some nomenclatural depth and Kabbalistic finesse. Thus women, by the dastardly use of their reproductive organs, tyrannize over men, enrich themselves, and control the world in the process.
Podnebesny calls his theory “vaginocapitalism,” wherein women are the bourgeoisie and the incels, or volcels as they should be called, are leaders of the dawning proletarian revolution. The capitalists, women, own the means of production – or reproduction, as the case may be – and the goal of the revolutionaries is nationalization of this exploiter class and equitable division of their property. So the endgame scenario of Podnebesny’s “vaginocommunism” is very much along the lines of a just and fair society envisioned by Alexandra Kollontai, the People’s Commissar for Public Welfare in Lenin’s cabinet and a staunch advocate of what was known in that epoch as “free love.”
Here is a sample order issued under Kollontai’s aegis by the authorities in the city of Vladimir in 1918. “Every woman of legal age is hereby declared to be state property [and] obliged, under the penalty of law, to register with the Free Love Office. A Free Love Office registrant has the right to choose a male aged 19-50 as a cohabiting partner, while men have an equal right to choose among women who have reached the age of majority. Interested persons may choose a spouse once a month.” Lest the gentle reader think that I made this up as I went along, I assure him that the quotation is from an encyclopedic study published in Moscow in 1964 entitled Brak i semya v SSSR (“Marriage and Family in the Soviet Union”).
My point, and the reason why this story fascinates me, is that Podnebesny’s view of the world has so much in common not only with Marx’s, but with virtually every social doctrine out there, and even with a few scientific or pseudoscientific ones. It is, in other words, a good vehicle for the metaphor. From deconstruction to psychoanalysis, from critical theory to racial equality, from radical feminism to decolonization and climate change, all the buzz outside our tightly shuttered windows has ever had at its source but a single idea, that of redress, redefinition, redistribution, and revenge.
A sympathizer would object that the idea, in fact, is of “a struggle to dismantle structures of oppression, exclusion, and domination,” but I reckon that’s just another way of putting it. I would merely add that the terminus of this struggle is, inevitably, the concentration camp.
And the rape camp.
It seems to me that the solution to predatory feminism would be voluntary poverty rather than voluntary celibacy. This would weed out the obvious predators and allow men and women to meet on a more cooperative plane of existence for existence sake. I stress that I do mean voluntary poverty, not the poverty that results from the taking of another’s wealth.
My understanding of the term “incel” is that it relates to that class of males who, because they are too poor, ugly etc. or they live in a place like China where, due to the one child policy of decades, have no statistical possibility of finding a mate, cannot hope to get a girl. It is not a pose, but a source of intense frustration and misery that sometimes leads them to hurt themselves or others. The Hollywood culture has raised the expectations of both men and women to a ludicrous degree. Compromise is not an option for those who allow themselves to be so indoctrinated. It is an absolute explosion of narcissism.
My grandfather, who came of age and started a family in the Great Depression and had much more in that period than he did as a child growing up in a mining town in Pennsylvania, would call all of this “high class problems”- the sort of problems invented by wealthy and powerful people to distract themselves from the bankruptcy of their own souls. If you want to meet a girl, go to church, know the family, marry someone from a similar background. This is no guarantee of happiness, but will tend to weed out the predatory fanatics. Americans will soon mostly be on one level and if they do not learn to cooperate as families and communities they will be eaten up by the predators of every description who will cooperate as long as they don’t run out of easy victims.
Mr Strenk I think you have fingered the essence of the solution “ Americans will soon mostly be on one level and if they do not learn to cooperate as families and communities they will be eaten up by the predators of every description who will cooperate as long as they don’t run out of easy victims.”
This reminded me of a passage from the Confessions this morning when St Augustine was remembering his intellectual associations with ideologues during his university years.
“I did not understand that evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains”Families and communities at a very elementary level know something about what’s good in their lives and should not and presumably will not, let it all be taken from them at the hands of vandals.
Incels and vocels: I knew there were many things of which I was ignorant. And here are two more. Thank you (?), Andre. I recall my very early days at TRI in the family program receiving from time to time a newsletter of the “Men’s Movement.” I completely forget the name, but it was what you might expect–the Bolt, the Charger, the Lance, the Bastion–or something equally goofy. To be sure there were men with legitimate grievances about court systems depriving them of their children, etc., but I could not suppress the question after scanning the thing: “Did some big girl kick sand in your face?”
“. . , the terminus of this struggle is, inevitably, the concentration camp.” And the campers in it/them will be the wealthiest and most powerful, walled up against the hordes of the rest of us. It/they will be very comfortable, except perhaps sociopsychologically.
As for the “rape camp” Mr. Wilson foresees, it exists. It’s called Hollywood.
“…walled up against the hordes of the rest of us.”
They have foreseen this eventuality, which is why they have, so far unsuccessfully, been trying to exterminate us for at least a century and a quarter, unless you count the Puritan obsession with other people’s fecundity, in which case they’ve been at it much longer. Practice makes perfect. They seem to be improving their methods, or are we just becoming stupider and more gullible?