Only a few days after the Toronto killings, George Mason University economist Robin Hanson suggested in a now-infamous blog post that "involuntary celibacy" and "sexual inequality" in general could be fixed, and violence reduced, if we as a society set out to "redistribute" sex more equally.How, exactly, Hanson thinks this could be done isn't clear, though his post vaguely referenced the idea that "[s]ex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation." After some critics pointed out that this "direct redistribution" of sex sounded an awful lot like government-sponsored sex slavery, Hanson added a defensive update to his original post. “Sex choices are influenced by a great many factors and each such factor offers a possible lever for influencing sex inequality,” he wrote, suggesting “promoting monogamy and discouraging promiscuity” as two options. “Rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!” (Notably, he did not deny that they were possible levers.)
It's no wonder that many incels are now embracing Peterson as one of their own. “[H]e is on our side, and his very very smart,” declared one new fan on Incels.me. “He understands the incel problem 100% and I love him.”“Enforced monogamy” isn't the only notion that Peterson seems to have picked up or somehow absorbed by osmosis from the manosphere. His claim that women would rather share our society's limited number of “alpha males” than spend their lives with a boring beta is essentially just a variation on the manosphere’s widespread notion of female “hypergamy.”– people can opt in or opt out of enforced monogamy
– if they opt in they pay lower taxes and get free basic income from the govt
– marriage laws must first be overhauled so that men aren’t disadvantaged and family courts are fair
– in enforced monogamy people must be married to have sex, and if you get divorced you have to go through a 6 month waiting period where you are not allowed to have sex, this is to discourage people from getting married and then divorced for every hookup
But she didn't cause any of this. If this story is true, the accused shooter engineered his own humiliation by publicly pursuing Shana after she had repeatedly said she wanted nothing to do with him. And he is the one who apparently decided to respond to the humiliation he brought upon himself not by punching a pillow or writing some angsty poetry or perhaps even reconsidering his clearly fault courtship strategy, but by murdering ten people.You can't solve the problem of aggrieved male entitlement by engineering some weird and at least semi-coercive program of “enforced monogamy” built on the assumption that men inherently deserve some sort of access to women's bodies—regardless of what the women inhabiting these bodies want. You can't rid the world of violence born of aggrieved male entitlement with a “solution” that reinforces that sense of entitlement.No, the only solution is to challenge that entitlement directly. We might start by trying to do a better job of teaching boys and young men that no means no, not that they should simply “keep trying.”BIO: David Futrelle tracks internet misogyny on his blog We Hunted the Mammoth (WeHuntedTheMammoth.com). His writing has appeared in The Cut, the HuffPost, the New York Times and the Washington Post.You can't rid the world of violence born of aggrieved male entitlement with a “solution” that reinforces that sense of entitlement.