Right to "sexual access": the idea that is gaining strength thanks to the misogynistic collectives of the Internet
The redistribution of sex: is the title of the last opinion column of commentator Ross Douthat for The New York Times. The text has caused commotion in the networks. The main idea launched by Douthat is that, in a neoliberal world in which the consummation of any desire of the individual is guaranteed (provided you have money), anyone can claim a right to carnal access that should be guaranteed even by a legal framework. Sex is not an activity of mutual consent, but a public good that must be redistributed. It is something that would benefit, according to the author, sexual minorities or people with functional diversity, but the main subject of conquest of right would be the heterosexual man. Women would have to start distributing sex.
Massacre in Canada: many have considered their column in bad taste precisely because of the information rack on which it is based to launch these ideas, the massive run over on the streets of Toronto. Alek Minassian, the person responsible for the attack, attacked passers-by as revenge against women who did not pay attention to him in his life. It ended the life of ten people and destroyed the lives of their relatives because he was sexually frustrated.
And war on the net: Minassian was an Incel, an acronym for "involuntary celibates" in its original English. For years, a huge community of men has met in various forums (4chan, reddit, but not only these spaces) to provide feedback on victimhood and hostility towards the opposite sex, which, as we are seeing, derives in the best of cases from a misogyny of low intensity and at worst in murder. In the forums they blame their low status and their frustration on women for their "selective promiscuity", for choosing only one type of man (the alpha male, according to them) to the detriment of others. They have come to affirm that the Toronto attack is basically the fault of those women who, by ignoring them, throw men into the arms of irremediable homicidal violence.
With his text, the New York Times columnist has done two things: collect and give an intellectual patina to the ideas that swarm through this community and confer on the idea of "the right to have sex" an authority that almost nobody had given until now.
Toronto is not the first: several Incels have as a messianic figure Elliot Rodger, an American teenager who recorded a video before getting involved with his classmates only because the girls he liked had rejected him. All the mass murders in Canada recorded in its history have been perpetrated by men who hated women.
Sexual inequality: exists and has been investigated multiple times. Our laws of courtship, our way of socializing and relating to the other gender makes men more detached and more demanding. In general (although it varies a lot depending on the attributes of the subject), they are the ones that have to filter. The most radical version of this gender inequality is found in flirting applications. As some have pointed out, this gap in gender appeal takes the same form as the Lorenz curve, and when it manifests in the economic sphere (20% live much better than 80% of the planet) causes societies to be scandalized and combat that inequality between individuals. However, even if the Incels think otherwise, while men go from the most attractive aunts to bombarding girls with messages from enough to remarkably loud, they have no problem messaging with ugly boys, between four and remarkably low Both genders give anxiety to the most beautiful people in the apps, but they are more benevolent to those less graceful than them.
Anxiety about the status: as many have pointed out, the background of these forums is that the "access to sex" (and its lack of it) is nothing more than a procedure to access a better stratum. His lack of empathy towards the other gender would confirm the thesis. The Incels care more about the allocation of social success for having sex (and thus stop feeling like failures) than sex itself. The link between status, power and sex has been extensively discussed by feminists.
The Overton window: also known among journalists as "frame", is a key concept for both our profession and any public figure. It is a theory that defines the political reality of the moment as a window through which a range of acceptable ideas can pass. The idea of what is acceptable and what does not change, moves, depending on the inclination of society to one side or another of the spectrum. Ideas that a decade ago seemed completely normal could mount a scandal today. And vice versa.