Member-only story
Ignore the incels: men can feel love
I know the internet trolls are freaky. But men can and do love
I had a rough evening last week. Nothing harrowing, just one of those days. Those days when your shoes are strikingly the only ones by the door, where you’re the only one watching the kettle boil, and the one where none of the men messaging you inspire anything other than the deep sinking realisation that you aren’t excited to hear from any of them. That none of them, while perfectly nice, are going to be part of your story from here. That maybe, you’d experienced love for the last time.
This low mood wasn’t helped, as I stood there bemoaning the hopelessness of it all, by an idiot sending me his article advising women on dating, written in remarkably fluent incellish.
“If you say you like to travel,” Incel wrote, “men are thinking about all the foreign men who have been railing you. All the other men around the world who have been inside you. Sorry, but we are. It’s not attractive.” I stared in amazement. Did this dude really think we visit the ruins of Noto Antica or explore the forests of Gosaukamm to get laid? And worse than that, did men really think like this, sitting there imagining this while I was sharing my stories of the world I loved to explore?
