What Models and Mass Murderers Have in Common
When a mass murder shooting happens, we usually get a general reaction about gun control and then a specific reaction about motivation – if the killer is brown, the right-wing media will draw potential connections to Islam and if they are white, the mainstream media will try to affiliate it with white nationalism, Trump.
However, these commentaries often miss the common thread interwoven in all these cases – none of the shooters are getting laid.
They are almost always a member of the involuntarily celibate (incel for short).
Sometimes their status as such is consciously recognized and articulated.
Elliot Rogers who shot and killed 6 people in 2014 publicly wrote “One day incels will realize their true strength and numbers, and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system."
(This would in turn inspire Nikolas Cruz to write “Elliot Rogers will not be forgotten” and then go on to kill 19 at Stoneman Douglas High School).
Sometimes it is less consciously recognized.
Sun-Kyung who shot and killed 33 people at Virginia Tech had various mental issues but he didn’t first threaten violence until the police stopped by his dorm room and told him to stop bothering two women he had been instant messaging (see NY Times article explaining his life).
Over the last month we have seen two new shootings – one in Atlanta at two Asian massage parlors (8 deaths) and another in Colorado at a supermarket (10 deaths).
While the media expounded on explanations related to white nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism (which appear to be wrong according to the shooters at least), no one discussed the fact that both shooters were sexually frustrated 21 year old men.
We hear about racial and income inequalities, but we don’t hear about sex inequality e.g. the ability to have sex.
Today, almost a third of all men in the US between the ages of 18 and 30 reported having no sex in the past year – a number which has shot up in the last 10 years, while the number of women who report the same has stayed relatively level (see below).
This rising inequality is as dangerous as the other two - a society where young men increasingly cannot get laid is a society that is going to have some basic stability issues in the years to come.
While we could lay the blame of sexless young men on the rise of porn (and there is an excellent case to be made as this TedX talk points out), there is something else worth considering - why don’t women want to have sex with these men?
Over the last forty years, we have seen a shift in college enrollment.
In the 1970s, colleges were over 60% male.
Today they are 45% male.
At the moment, there are 5.5mm college educated women below the age of 30 and 4mm college educated men.
Let’s marry this fact with another one - women have a hard time dating down. The female graduate in chemical engineering doesn’t marry the guy with the GED.
Women typically want a man who can improve her resource matrix and provide security – this imperative is laced into her DNA.
Men are generally indifferent to such qualities.
In other words, if you were to reduce dating to a logic problem – it would go as follows – a man can go for any women but a woman will only go for a men at or above her “level.”
In 1970, this logic function could work smoothly.
Back then, 20% of men had a bachelor’s degree versus 12% of women (see below).
For the 80% of men who didn’t have a college education that meant that while 12% of all women were out of bounds for them, they still had access to the other 88% of women.
The 12% of women who did have a college degree were fine as there were plenty of men with college degrees to go around - college educated men out numbered college educated women 2 to 1.
Over the last roughly 50 years things have changed markedly.
In 2015, roughly 37% of all women had a college degree whereas only 30% of all men did.
If you are part of that unfortunate demographic of men who didn’t earn a college degree, your dating pool has gone from 88% of all women to 63%. Conversely if you are a female with a college degree, you now vastly outnumber the eligible men.
This new paradigm makes everyone worse off (from a dating perspective) – except the educated male.
The educated male today is not only making more than his uneducated brethren than he did in the past – but he also now has access to a much broader spectrum of females. The educated male can do whatever he wants while everyone else (particularly college educated females and non-college educated males) lose out.
If you live in a city like New York, you can see firsthand how this paradigm operates.
Walk into any restaurant and you will find a beautiful and accomplished female (one who is far more beautiful and accomplished than her mother) on a date with a guy whose face looks like a catcher’s mitt.
The female is delighted to be there, especially when the guy ignores his group chats to look up and converse with her.
Miss Beautiful Accomplished Woman of 2021, unlike Miss Beautiful Accomplished Woman of 1970, has no choice but to vie for a commitment from an ever-shrinking coterie of educated males (such as her evolutionary programing dictates). These men, in turn, are happy to sleep with her and even entertain the idea of committing to her but in the end they string her along.
They too are victims of evolutionary programming – one that causes them to seek novelty. In this new paradigm, novelty will continuously present itself and there is no cost for waiting.
Educated single women and the incels have a common cause - they are both fighting a system that is rigged against them.
One response to all this is to become hateful of the opposite sex with an almost ideological bent.
Radical feminism that seeks to dramatically change and reverse gender roles as well as the burgeoning men’s rights movements both have their emotional roots in that hate.
However, these ideologies don’t solve the problem.
Rather than going down that path, we need to first have a more open conversation about the problem and frame it appropriately.
Societies not only fall apart if men and women don’t settle down and have families but they go extinct (the birth rate in the Western world has been well below replacement level since this gender flip in college admissions occurred several decades ago). It’s not good for anyone if educated women and uneducated men have trouble finding partners and if educated men never have to answer for their behavior.
This is an existential problem and yet at the moment, there is no national conversation on this topic.
So first we have to talk about it.
And then we have to address it.
Finding ways to close the education gap between men and women - e.g. encourage men to get college degrees as well as dealing with income inequality would be a way to ultimately deal with the problem - make the dating landscape more equitable for uneducated men and educated women as it was in 1970.
However, this type of long term change would take a while to effect.
In the near term, we are left with some solutions that range from uncomfortable to bad.
Solution A - Embrace polygamy.
If educated men have the money and can support multiple partners then let them do so.
Besides the fact that this is a pretty unpalpable choice for all sorts of religious and moral reasons, a polygamous society creates a more permanent class of sexless young man with excess energy. That energy invariably turns towards violence.
Solution B - Women date more broadly.
No more societal stigmas around “dating down.” Educated woman like educated men feel it is okay to marry down especially if it in doing so you avoid being the fifth girl in a real estate broker’s rotation of women.
The 2011 hit comedy Bridesmaids actually got this right. Kristen Wiig’s character Annie spends much of the movie agonizing over her quasi relationship with a rich businessman who viewed her as a “fuck buddy.” Towards the end, Annie realizes he is a waste of time and goes for the cop who she had been ignoring.
Solution C - Women, society punish the Peter Pan Syndrome.
We collectively apply pressure on the Educated Males who act like Peter Pans and refuse to settle down by stigmatizing their behavior. Women have to collectively reduce their demand for this type. This requires for women to act like a cartel and not betray one another.
Seems unlikely.
Solution D - Educated men with lots of money take on the moral responsibility of not acting like reckless idiots.
This would be a great solution…
But South Park shows this is likely impossible - see here.
Solution B makes the most sense. The burden of saving civilization falls on women doing what men have always done - dating people beneath them on the social/educational ladder.
So please, single hot educated NYC girls (if you are reading this) - it is okay to date the guy with a union job.
Together, you two can save Western Civilization from a demographic collapse.