Lorelei Weldon
2 min readJun 19, 2023

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I've seen a huge amount of empathy for incels recently that completely and entirely fails to balance basic human compassion with the fact that incels as a group are violent misogynists who not only gleefully talk about how women are subhuman and deserve to be raped and/or die but who have actually killed many, many people - most of them women. Not all lonely guys subscribe to that, but it is what the term incel indicates these days and many governments now consider them a dangerous radicalized group.

For a lot of women, soliciting empathy for lonely men, without also noting that many women are also lonely (the term incel was created by a woman) and without noting that amongst incels there is a huge amount of entitlement to, along with outright hatred of, women is adding insult to injury. Apparently that doesn't count though.

There's this weird expectation that women take their abuse gracefully, that they always show kindness and compassion for those who abuse them, and that when instead they react with perfectly normal emotions around that the attention turns from why they might be angry to the inappropriateness of their anger. White men don't seem to ever be held to this standard.

As someone else recently pointed out, women are constantly being held responsible for things like not getting raped (rather than focusing on the fact that men shouldn't rape) but yet, there's no commensurate responsibility for lonely men to learn how to dress and behave in ways that would make them more attractive to women. Where's the loud demand from men that we show more empathy for the huge numbers of young girls who are sexually harassed and raped before they are even truly adults? Where are the loud demands for more empathy for the fact that even though it's illegal, many women are still not paid the same as men for the same work? This imbalance is the source of the anger.

Entitlement isn't annoying - when you've experienced that constantly your entire life, it's soul eating and dehumanizing and just one small aspect of the indignities and outright hostility that most women deal with constantly. The fact that you don't understand that means you really ought to stop telling women what's wrong with their response to how men treat them and start focusing on that content for men.

Also, don't refer to women as "those people" as if they were a childlike alien species that you need to educate for their own betterment. It's really condescending.

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Lorelei Weldon

Student of human nature and advocate for a safer, saner, more love-infused world. If I read it, there’s a good chance I’ll leave a comment.