By Sia Jyoti.
I have come to accept that someone with my level of faith in humanity is destined to feel perpetually disappointed with reality. A recent example of this emotion being triggered was in my Law, Gender and Society lecture when despite being in a lull from my lack of caffeination, I noticed the fact that not one man took this module. Initially, my peers and I laughed at our mutual realisation but it was only until the seminar that I was met with my underlying rage. In a discussion about the ways in which the legal system would disappoint us, both as future practising lawyers and as potential victims of the system, it struck me why no man was enrolled in this module. It boiled down to the privilege of not having to educate yourself on the systematic inequalities that we, as women, are bound to face.
Now, whilst I can write a paper on this subject alone, I would like to move on to the current event that reignited this notion of the oppressed educating themselves on their oppressor for me: Andrew Tate and the rise in incels. The first time I came across the term incels (involuntary celibate) was in a New Yorker article in 2018. The article discussed the circumstances in which groups from both genders were unable to be intimate despite a desire to do so, yet differentiated in the way they dealt with this. Women, thanks to greater attention towards female liberation in the forms of education and empowerment, sought to raise their self-esteem through other forms of validation. This inevitably meant that men no longer became the primary source for a woman to feel worthy in society. This for me is modern-day liberation; the ability for a woman to define herself without the perception of any man.
Yet, since we continue to exist in patriarchy, our little wins are quickly met with massive losses: and here we see the rise in incels. When women found their worth and were no longer available to men that were below their standards, a group of men found themselves generating an ideology embedded in pure misogyny which they deemed a suitable response to their inability to be decent human beings. In the 2018 article, they recorded the existence of at least sixteen deaths in the US alone that had occurred in the pursuit of incel ideology. This could be easily summarised by a quote from one of the murderers in 2014 that declared that his actions were in the hopes of starting a war, not against, but ‘on women’ for ‘depriving’ him of sex. The attention I have drawn on his choice of ‘War on Women’ as opposed to a ‘War against women’ is to illustrate the power dynamic he subconsciously shares he holds. A war against someone is in opposition to them, it assumes fairness and a starting point of equality. On, in contrast, already assumes that one group will be above another. A visual image of an attempt to crush the rise of something is what I imagined when I saw this quote. Now, eight years since Elliot Rogers’s misogyny-fuelled murders took place, I feel we have made limited progress as a society.
At the point of his peak in social media presence, Andrew Tate had made apparent his views on women. Whilst the utter absurdity of some of these views made them laughable to the general public, I had hoped that the corresponding rumours of his alleged sex trafficking and rape allegations reduced his normalisation. Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the start of this article or what some might see as an organised rant, hopeful people are often disappointed. After a casual dig at him in a funny manner so that I wasn’t called a crazy feminist (I’m so crazy for being scared of my biggest natural predator aren’t I?), my messages were flooded with defensive responses from so many university friends. What surprised me most was the number of objectively normal, sweet, and educated boys in my DM’s who shared in their feeling that “not everything he says is bad, he has a point a lot of the time”.
For my own sanity and the limited word count on this, I refuse to unravel the many problems with that statement. Additionally, I find myself mentally exhausted from having to justify disappointment in the male desire to find rational points made by a man who openly tweets that women are responsible for their sexual assault. If you are happy to do this, then how come my, actually researched and now proven defence for Amber Heard is met with literal barbaric rage and an unfounded accusation that I don’t care about male issues when I can positively list the boys I have offered therapy to for free? For now, I will cut down on my charity work. Meanwhile, naively, I yet again hope that this year we won’t offer our platforms up to lunatics, who can convince more lunatics to spend their money on something as laughable as Hustlers University.