Author, media pundit and activist Dan Savage appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” this past Friday, May 18.
Savage spoke at length about the need to destigmatize and decriminalize sex work, both for sex workers and for sex buyers.
The discussion was framed within the larger context of incels— a community of men united by their inability to convince women to have sex with them. (“Incel” stands for “involuntarily celibate.”) Alek Minassian, the man who killed ten people and injured 14 by driving a van down a busy street in Toronto this past April, is an incel, as was Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 in 2014 near Santa Barbara, CA.
“They are angry that women don’t like them and they can’t get laid,” said Maher, explaining incles. “And this is a social movement now, and they want the government to provide prostitutes for them.”
“Not quite prostitutes,” Savage clarified and elaborated. “They [incels] talk about redistributing sex as a commodity, and it’s about, really, enslaving women. It’s Handmaid’s Tale stuff, not about sex workers. It’s about the government giving you a woman as a slave… not, the government giving you a voucher so you can go see a sex worker.”
“They’re nasty,” Maher said. “And they wonder why [they] can’t get laid.”
Savage circled the conversation back with a bit more gravity.
“I hear every day from people who are miserable because they haven’t been touched ever. They’re virgins, or they haven’t had a relationship in 20 years. Sexual deprivation and romantic deprivation does make people miserable,” he explained. “Not all of those people become incels… but this is truly immiserating, that kind of loneliness and that kind of despair.”
Savage then asked rhetorically, “There’s a lot of people out there who don’t have sex and don’t have relationships and [within that] there’s this tiny percentage that become active in this incel community – what’s the difference?”
Working through the answer to his own question, he said: “The way men are socialized to believe that women are their property and [that] they are entitled to women’s bodies, and that meets with the black mold of misogyny that grows all over the internet – and those are the two places we need to really intervene.”
According to Savage, socialization and misogyny are what create incels, not sexual deprivation itself.
“What changed?” Maher asked, adding for context that when he couldn’t get laid as a younger person, his strategies were markedly different from murder and/or government-sanctioned enslavement. Maher’s game included things like starting a band, thinking of becoming a doctor or even getting a job at a restaurant and fucking his co-workers (with consent, or course) – that sort of thing.
Though he did not address specifically how the culture has deviated so far from ideas like Start a band because chicks dig musicians, Savage suggested, in addition to socializing men differently, destigmatizing and decriminalizing sex work would be beneficial.
“There are people out there who don’t have any social skills — and the Venn diagram of ‘no social skills’ and ‘incels’ is a circle,” he said.
Savage continued: “When you think of sex work and sex workers and decriminalizing and destigmatizing, it’s not just destigmatizing sex work for the sex worker, but also for the sex buyer – and what the culture says about someone who buys sex is that he’s a criminal, he’s a misogynist, he’s a monster, he’s a loser.”
“One of the things that gets said about the incels is ‘Why don’t they just go see sex workers?’ Well, they already feel like losers, so going to a sex worker is only going to make that worse, especially if they are prosecuted,” Savage explained. “There are some people who the only way they will ever get laid is to buy it — is to pay for it — and that shouldn’t be stigmatized.
Savage went on to cite the film The Sessions (2012) starring Helen Hunt, wherein the main character is so physically disabled that – in Savage’s assessment — the only way he’s ever going to have sex is if he buys it.
“Some people are so socially disabled that the only outlet for any sort of sex or [human] contact is buying it,” he explained.
Watch the full episode here.
Image via Asif Akbar.
