Toby Young Toby Young

What every incel needs: a sex robot

In a recent blogpost, an American economics professor called Robin Hanson asked why it is that income inequality is regarded as a terrible injustice by liberal progressives, but sex inequality — the fact that attractive people generally have more sex than unattractive people — is thought of by the same people as an unalterable fact of life that no one should complain about. ‘One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organising around this identity,’ he wrote.

Hanson was prompted to ask this question by last week’s Toronto van attack in which Alek Minassian, a 25-year-old man who described himself as an ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate), killed ten people and injured 15, the worst mass killing in Canada since 1989. In a Facebook post that surfaced after his arrest, Minassian announced that the ‘incel rebellion has already begun’ and ‘all the Chads and Stacys’ (sexually attractive men and women) would be overthrown. In that post, Minassian praised Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old American who killed six and injured a further 14 in 2014, before taking his own life. Rodger wrote an incel manifesto in which he raged about being sexually frustrated and vowed to take revenge on the women who wouldn’t sleep with him.

Hanson wasn’t defending these two mass murderers, but querying why incels had been dismissed in the media as ‘self-pitying’ and ‘lonely weirdos’ in the aftermath of the Toronto attack, often by the same journalists and commentators who decry other forms of inequality. Why are terrorists who murder people in the name of redistributing wealth, like Che Guevara, lionised by the left, whereas terrorists whose aim is to draw attention to sex inequality are detested? A columnist on the Scottish Daily Record said Minassian was a ‘pathetic little boy who can’t get a girlfriend’.

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