“How does the literary canon reinforce the logic of the incel?”
“Where did these young men get the idea that male pathos (stereotypically defined by them as sexual frustration) is so pathetic, so worthy of tribute? One possible answer to the question, one we don’t discuss very much, is our culture’s literary history. The incel isn’t just a monstrous birth of our casually cruel and anonymous internet culture. He is also a product of anglo-American literary culture, which (particularly in the 20th century) treats the topic of male sexual frustration as if it is of prime importance to us all…
I choose The Things They Carried to pick on here because it’s a favorite of mine. I think it’s brilliant, but it offers a prime example of the way our literary culture has long treated rage and aggression as if they are normal features of (white) male sexuality. (The racial component is of course significant here, since the exact opposite has long been true for depictions of black male sexuality, which have been represented as essentially and problematically aggressive.) The literature we choose to teach our children evidences how untroubled we are by this disturbing cliche that rage and a fascination with violation are characteristic features of (again, white) male sexuality.
By contrast, novels of women’s frustration with society — not sex — like those of Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin, are classed as special interest pieces: feminist fiction or women’s fiction, not Great American Novels…
This all becomes even more ironic when we consider the history — not literary, but real — of identifying women’s sexual frustration as the psychological problem of hysteria. For hundreds of years, women were literally committed because of a “disease” that male doctors attributed to a handful of sexual causes”
