In general, people like me will never be taken as a partner. (And the other way around.) 

I am still alive, long may it last! So I should pay my due to humanity by sharing my wisdom with the world, right? Well, there is pearls before swine, but I like to think that fairly few swine find their way here. (Not counting the repeated Google searches for “anime babes” and such. I don’t think they stay long.)

Recently I learned a new North American word, “incel”. It is a shorthand for “involuntary celibate”, and evidently in recent months some of those folks have decided that this is sufficient reason to rape, murder or just be a public nuisance. And of course giving a bad name to celibate men everywhere.

So, let us look at this from a place far above the dust clouds of the news media.

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Of course there are many men who are involuntarily celibate, and this is pretty much normal for much or all of your life. We know this because if we look at the human genome, you have roughly twice as many female ancestors as male ones.

Wait, that can’t be right, can it? After all, you have one father and one mother (dead or alive), two grandfathers and two grandmothers, four great-grandfathers and four great-grandmothers. In each and every generation, it take exactly 1 man and 1 woman to make a baby.

True. But once you start looking back through your ancestry, you will find male names popping up in more than one place. It may take some time, but if you have a large and complex map of your ancestry, this will increasingly happen as you go back in time. And a map made from genes will show more of this than one made from church books. The reason for these duplicates is that this guy had kids with his wife, but also with his servant girl (or slave, or prisoner of war, or some other woman he had power over). These kids, when they survived, made their own branches of your family tree, and after some generations they forgot that they were related to the main family (if they even knew).

In addition, some men also had children with other men’s wives, but this is actually less common than I expected – it seems that women are not more likely to have extramarital sex during their most fertile days, despite predictions by evolutionary biologists that this would make up almost all of their fence jumping, while they would have sex with their beta husbands the rest of the month to keep him paying the bills (or chasing away cave bears, in our distant past). Turns out women aren’t usually that focused on getting the “alpha” genes for their babies, to the big surprise of theoretical biologists.

Going further back than the last few generations, there is rather a lot of slavery and servitude and serf-i-tude with the slave owners, the rich and the nobles having a field day with the women who served them. That’s when we don’t have outright polygamy, which was common in the Bronze Age and for some time afterwards.

There was a brief interval in the 20th century when monogamy was seen as so much of an ideal that a higher proportion of the men were married than today, but the servant girls still got pregnant with their masters (or the master’s son). They just weren’t supposed to talk about i.

Anyway, being celibate whether you want it or not is perfectly normal and a fairly larger percentage of the male population will be in this situation for years on end, and some for life.

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Labeling yourself as “involuntarily celibate” when you are 19 is about as ingenious as calling yourself “involuntarily poor” when you are subsisting on student loans. You aren’t supposed to get everything right away. Sure, all the guys in your high school class were going on and on about the awesome sex they had with named girls pretty all the time. But you know what? Unless you live in Scandinavia or some such, a lot of them lied. Possibly even there. You really ought to know that: After all, unless you were seriously God-fearing, you probably did the same yourself. Boys lie about how many girls they’ve slept with, and girls lie about how few guys they’ve slept with. We know this because if we interview enough men and women about their sexual history, the numbers don’t match up at all. Even in anonymous surveys, there is still a substantial difference.

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Once you’re a working adult, we can start talking about being involuntarily celibate. But then, we can talk about a lot of involuntary things. Like involuntary poverty, for instance the couple billion people who can’t eat whenever they want to or wear shoes whenever they want to. But you don’t compare yourself to them, do you? You compare yourself to the rich and famous. After all, a thousand advertisements have told you that you deserve the best, even though the objective fact is that you aren’t the best, far from it. How about you compare yourself to the involuntarily blind, the involuntarily deaf, the involuntarily wheelchair-bound, the involuntarily missing fingers and broken spines. I guess involuntarily stupid can be combined with incel, though. So there is that.

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“Involuntary sex is no worse than involuntary lack of sex” is a valid hypothesis. But as always in science, you need to run tests of  both scenarios. I am sure going to jail as a rapist will help you test out your hypothesis right quick. Being a whiner in prison should be a good way to attract involuntary sex, at least in America. And involuntary violence as well. It can’t be worse than involuntary lack of violence, can it? If someone wants to fight with you, why should they have to restrain themselves? After all, it is fun for them, so they would be suffering if they had to concern themselves about other people’s feelings. Lack of pleasure is suffering now, evidently. Such a terrible suffering that the world needs to know.

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Basically, we are all suffering involuntarily in many ways. As the Buddha said (loosely translated), “life is suffering”. There aren’t many things we know for sure, but some things we know for sure: We will all lose our youth, our health, our family, our friends, our belongings and our life. Some will lose them one by one, others will lose them all at once. Me, I am involuntarily mortal, and it bothers me a great deal. Celibacy not so much. Definitely less than involuntarily not playing City of Heroes. Luckily, if I stay alive till December, I should be in on the Ship of Heroes beta, which is widely expected to be better than sex. (Your sex may vary.)