So now that New York Times resident other-conservative-no-not-David-Brooks-that-other-one-whatshisname Ross Douthat has more or less admitted that he can't get laid and has brought the whole godforsaken discussion of "involuntary celibacy" and "redistribution of sex" into the mainstream (along with fuck robots), well, shit, I guess it's time to pants the nerds. In his latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "post-masturbation dribbles"), Douthat discusses the intersection between incels, high-minded bullshit artists conning people with dumbass ideas like "redistribution of sex," and, yes, fuck robots. He's just theorizing, mind you, in the same way that eugenicists and Charles Murray theorize about race.
Douthat says that by talking about the more sensational parts of the "debate" (as if there was a debate on this before a bunch of horny losers got sick of jacking off to the same hentai), we "can surface issues and problems that lurk beneath the surface of more mainstream debates." And then, honest to fucking god and the god of fucking, he blames the sexual revolution for some people not getting more ass: "the sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration."
No, motherfucker, the sexual revolution allowed women to have agency over their bodies. It meant that date rape wasn't just something that happened to bad girls. It meant that women could choose their partners more freely the same way that men chose theirs. The new "winners" were an entire sex. And if they liked hunky guys, well, that's evolution, man, like it or not. By the way, let's be honest here: it wasn’t exactly a pussy paradise for unlikeable and unattractive assholes (or the obese or introverted) before the sexual revolution, either.
Everything else Douthat writes (and, indeed, everything that incels and "No, I'm totally not an incel" writers talk about) follows from that basic misunderstanding about a world that transformed so women could have a chance to be equals on the sexual (and political and economic) playing field. When he says, "[T]he sexes seem to be struggling generally to relate to one another, with social and political chasms opening between them and not only marriage and family but also sexual activity itself in recent decline," what he's really talking about is that there are a fuckload of men who simply refuse to accept that they are not only losing power to non-whites. They're losing it to women. Fuckin' deal with that shit.
And then there's this purely ignorant overview of contemporary sexuality: "the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states." Two things: In the real world, that first part is patently untrue. That is the porn mentality. In a recent survey of American adults, most of the respondents are fine with regular ol' sexy time. The illusion of porn, especially if you watch too much porn (c'mon, Rossy, baby, you can tell your pal the Rude Pundit), makes people believe they should be having more exotic sex, but they don't. And virginity and celibacy? There is a whole movement of asexual people who are becoming as accepted as fluid gender identities among millennials and teens.
Yet, with this swamp of bullshit stinking up the joint, Douthat ventures to say that "I expect the logic of commerce and technology will be consciously harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incels." And that legalizing and legitimizing sex work will also do the trick, as it were, as will the fuck robots.
While Douthat has read people like the frightening Robin Hanson, I'm gonna bet he has never spent time on the incel message boards. You won't find a group of sympathetic but socially-inept lost souls. No, you'll find savage misogynists who blame women for not fucking them, who mock overweight women for desiring hot men, who think women who stay in abusive relationships get off on it, and who "joke" about killing and maiming and enslaving women. They believe, like Douthat, that the sexual revolution left them behind and they're pissed that they don't get to control women. And while some are genuinely pitiable fools who fell in with this group of MRAs and alt-righters and wayward Gamergaters, enough aren't that it's a scary fucking movement that has already led to violence.
You think a sex worker, who can tell them to fuck off if they want and walk out, or a fuck robot will make them happy? No one who brings up the phrase "redistribution of sex" wants anything other than someone who must bend to their will. The control must be real, not pretend. To say that sex can be redistributed means that some means of distribution must be established, which means a kind of sexual slavery.
Which is really what many women endured before the sexual revolution called "bullshit" on the whole hierarchy of gender. Only the worst losers among us can think it would be better to go back to that time.
Oh, and if the incel movement was legit, you'd have a whole lot of women involved. Funny how that works.
(Note: This is totally different from prostitutes working with disabled adults or, really, anyone legitimately seeking a sex worker for an experience.)
(Note 2: It shouldn't need to be said, but sex workers are deserving of the same dignity as every worker.)
(Note 3: A good many people on the incel boards are obviously just in it for the lulz of getting people raging at women. That doesn't make them less skeevy.)