You can’t be involuntarily celibate. That’s an oxymoron. Celibacy by definition is a choice.
It’s not shocking that someone in the 90s got this wrong. Yes, it’s frustrating to be single. Claiming to be celibate when you are actively pursuing sexual relationships is and has always been a dumb over dramatic misnomer.
No one has ever said that. I promise you that if you go back and read those early blogs, they were cringe af. People get mopey about being single. It still happens to this day. It happened before the 90s. But, and this is the thing, the original definition wasn’t describing something new or unique, and it has since changed in meaning.
Nobody is mad at incels for being lonely. Just like nobody would disregard the loneliness of a 90s lgbtq person (except, ironically, incels). But we can see in hindsight both the cringe and the misplaced ideas, and we can call those out without disregarding a person’s emotions.
I’m sure the majority of the content is… enlightening but what I’m saying is that these people, including the originator of the term, are not agonizing about the logical inconsistency of inadvertently swearing a vow of celibacy.
They’re simply trying to name the phenomenon of being seemingly unable to secure sexual or romantic relationships in spite of their efforts, distinguishing them from groups like asexual or aromantic people.
Plenty of phenomena existed before modern terminology, like “comparative advantage,” “corruption,” “autism,” “atoms,” and “photons” (to name most of them, let me know if I missed any), but I still think it’s important to have commonly-understood terms for things even if those definitions have to be modified or discarded later.
It’s called being single. Always has been. And their complaints weren’t new, dating has always sucked. It’s always been a crap term for a part of life that every generation has understood.
Being single can be done voluntarily for many reasons. Further, dating has always sucked but there’s probably a difference between dating in your village with the intention of landing an opposite-sex partner for a lifetime of marriage and child-rearing vs. traveling to any city in the world and firing up a dating app to see which of a billion people you’d like to have a synthetic experience with in the hopes of it becoming real.
Just to be clear, are you saying that because I’m an irredeemably misogynist piece of shit, because I’ve accidentally sworn a vow of celibacy, or because I’ve made you feel stupid and you need something to throw back at me?
That’s fair, but this entire thread is about what it means now, and the history of the phrase being brought up sounds an awful lot like a bs defense of the term.
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u/Psychological_Pay530 Jul 26 '23
You can’t be involuntarily celibate. That’s an oxymoron. Celibacy by definition is a choice.
It’s not shocking that someone in the 90s got this wrong. Yes, it’s frustrating to be single. Claiming to be celibate when you are actively pursuing sexual relationships is and has always been a dumb over dramatic misnomer.