Why do almost all 'incels' blame their situation on looks?

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I have to agree with hurtloam on this one.
Why does anyone want a date? Most of us are looking for that emotional connection with another person.
Other reasons for wanting a date... are less attractive to me.

sorry, it ate my post and said I had prove I was not a robot or something.


I only said to hurtloam, what is wrong with being choosey.

I can't wrap my head around why people fixate on looks as the 'hook', if they are seeking a long term emotional connection.
Why not focus on personality.

Because it is easy, both for attraction and rejection.

It's a self sabotaging approach for people with Autism. As if socialising didn't use up enough energy... who has extra left over to spend on a wishful possibility instead of a considered probability.

It's not a good use of the autists social reserves to focus on looks as a first step if what they really seek is that emotional connection.

I'm not my sure how your question relates to what I wrote?

I'm arguing that people are choosy... about more than just looks.

For those who met their mate via being introduced by a mutual acquaintance, their first impression was based on the person's overall reputation (as relayed by the mutual acquaintance), NOT the person's looks.

For other people, back in the old days before online dating, there were personal ads, which usually were NOT accompanied by photos. The initial snail mail reply to a personal ad was sometimes accompanied by a photo, but more often wasn't. After that, the next step was a phone conversation, and then the first date. So, for people who used personal ads, first impressions were based on writing and then voice, along with the substance of what was said in the ad, the letter, and the phone call -- NOT the person's looks, which in most cases were not seen until the first date itself.

The world didn't "run off looks" until fairly recently.

This is a problem that has crept up on Western society over the past century or so, starting with the advent of the mass media and mass market advertising, both of whose prime imperatives were to grab people's attention -- which wasn't nearly as necessary in older, smaller-scale societies where everyone already knew everyone.

The rise of mass market society took a further big leap forward with the advent of the Internet, which now enabled ordinary individual people, not just big TV networks and ad agencies, to try to reach out to a mass market. Today's dating apps are an example of this.

Never before in human history has courtship been coupled with a mass market mentality. The extreme superficiality of it all is NOT an inevitable, eternal fact of nature -- it is a consequence of today's "attention economy," as it has been called.

IMO, this problem could be solved if enough people were to decide to use the Internet to create their own relatively small human-scale subcultures, of whatever kind, and seek partners primarily within their chosen subcultures. This would be a return to a more natural style of courtship.

Doing courtship online still is far from natural, and creating smaller sub-cultures would not solve that. In addition to that, some traits are better complementary rather than similar, and so forming couples that have exactly the same cultural preferences is not optimal.

I'd say the problem is made worse by the criminalization/moralization about natural human courtship. Today, men can no longer use their natural courtship to attract interest from women without risking getting socially excluded, and even simple things like the eye contact game appear to be considered as predatory in some circles.

But, if everyone identified with one or more small well-organized subcultures, it would much be easier for people to have meaningful friendship networks (both in person and online) and get introduced to people, reducing the need for online dating services in the first place. Also, insofar as dating services were still needed, they would serve smaller, more specialized customer bases, thereby cutting down on the ultra-superficial mass market mentality.


"Optimal" or not, it would be one heck of a lot less crazy-making than today's dating scene apparently is.

Of course, for heterosexuals there's the problem that, if one is to find a partner reasonably easily within one's own subculture, the subculture itself needs to have a roughly equal male-to-female ratio. Otherwise, perhaps predominantly male subcultures could team up with predominantly female subcultures on joint events and/or (better yet) joint projects that combine their interests in some hopefully not-too-unnatural ways? (Perhaps arrangements of the latter kind might also help to solve the complementarity problem you spoke of?)


I'd say that modern Western culture currently seems to be in a very uneasy, confusing state of transition regarding its rules of in-person courtship. The recently-previous commonly-accepted ways were very unsatisfactory due to expectations that the man be an aggressive pursuer and the woman play hard-to-get, causing many men (even many NT men) to mistake a real "No" for just playing hard-to-get -- which was one of the causes of the "rape culture," among other problems. So, good riddance to these old ways, if indeed we are in process of getting rid of them, as I sure hope we are.

Hopefully what Western culture will eventually (the sooner the better) transition to would be a more easy-going but mutual consent-based culture, similar to what exists in today's polyamory scene here in NYC according to Kirsten Lindsmith in Autism and Consent -- which is consistent with my memories of what the NYC polyamory scene was like back in the 1990's. (Note: I am not advocating that Western culture as a whole become polyamorous, but only that monogamous people eventually adopt a more mutual, more consent-based courtship style similar to what now exists in the poly scene, or at least the NYC poly scene.)

I can see many problems with that. First, if they are global in nature, then they need to be very narrow to remain small, and people would be scattered all over the world, much like any dating service targeting autistics currently is. Second, the need of specialization needed would make people very similar, and if people only socialize in that context, they will get a very biased view of what is normal and not.



Yes. Basically all subcultures I like (except for folklore/dancing) are mainly male.



I think it is better to just draw random NDs to groups ("subcultures") as that would contain a mixture of preferences which is more advantageous for creating successful couples. All that is needed is to keep the geographic area people are from more limited so the groups gets a suitable size. That also has the advantage that people actually can meet IRL.



I don't think verbal consent is of any use in courtship, especially not when courtship is by looks/nonverbal. I think sexual intercourse should require consent, but natural ND courtship is not about sexual intercourse so consent doesn't make any sense. I mean, you cannot ask somebody for consent to look at them repeatedly. You cannot ask for consent for starting the observation phase. You cannot ask for consent for going at activities your love interest participates in. You need to be observant if they reciprocate or not, and abort if they don't, but that is not consent.

Probably it's due to AS.

For most people, AS = personality.

We are now in 2019.

Of course, but if a given problem is not an eternal fact of nature but exists only as a result of recent social changes, then it's worth trying to envision what could be done on a larger-than-individual scale to solve the problem.

Yes they would be scattered all over the world, but, ideally, the subcultures would be big enough and well-organized enough to have an offline local presence in many different locales, so that people can more easily meet in real life.


People have always had "a very biased view of what is normal and not" based on their own culture, whatever it might be. However, if you live in a cosmopolitan city with lots of different visible subcultures, and/or if you attend a culturally diverse college, then it's easy to see that people aren't all alike. So I don't see the problem here.


By "groups" do you mean groups of NDs, specifically, or are you advocating that all manner of other groups try to do more outreach to NDs? If you mean groups of NDs, that would constitute a distinct subculture.


What do you think of Meetup.com?


Of course, you can't ask consent just to look at someone, but you can and should ask consent to hug or kiss them, especially when doing so for the first time.