By David Futrelle
Incels have a lot of thoughts about slavery. When they’re not fantasizing about enslaving women, or comparing their own plight to slavery, they sometimes ponder the history of slavery in the real world.
In general, their thoughts on this subject are not restrained by any actual knowledge, so their imaginations are free to wander. Consider, for example, this post on the Incels.is forum form last fall, in which a fellow calling himself ControlledInsanity asserted that enslaved women have historically had it extremely easy, living lives of happy idleness interrupted only by a few mostly pleasurable moments of sex.
Slavery itself accentuates the inherent value of each gender.
Enslaved men —> physical labor
Enslaved women —> sex
I cannot trick myself into believing that being forced to work hard manual labor is in any way “equal” to being kept to dispense periodic pleasure. Easy mode is not even a meme to me anymore, foids really actually do have a lower difficulty setting aura that follows them through life. All of their greatest successes and all of their greatest hardships are padded by special treatment.
Would anyone on this forum ever object to being a sex slave?
Naturally, a commenter quickly stepped up to praise Mr. Insanity’s post as “high IQ,.” Another congratulated him for his original insight:
i never thought it like that, hell even in ancient times foid slaves had it easy…fuck…..
To be a sex slave you have to be normie tier at least.
Still another contrasted the life of “a man slave” trapped in a life of “torturing labour” to the
female version … forced to lend her body couple of minutes a day to experience rough copulation and maybe orgasm with her owner.
One suggested that many men would kill to lead a life in which they were raped on a daily basis.
Truly wtf is it that what females consider a tortured existence would actually be a godsend for many men?
“Being a sex slave wouldn’t be bad,” added someone called Blue Squirtle.
but [foids] make … it seem worse, how is being a slave for sex as bad as labor? At least sex doesn’t result in getting whipped and beaten it the job isn’t done right.
Uh, I’m pretty sure it did, but never mind.
Still, not all of the commenters agreed that slavery had been a paradise of strawberries and rape for enslaved women. A commenter called JovanD, for example, was pretty sure that female slaves had to work, too.
Are you even aware how much slaves cost back in the day?
I highly doubt slave owner would have them sit around and do nothing but have sex…
Others suggested that being raped by a “big ugly man” on a daily basis might not actually be all that much fun for enslaved women — or men.
“You know that women really don’t want to fuck ugly, sweaty guys, right?” asked INeed4000Bucks.
That’s why chads don’t need sex slaves. I’m pretty sure the only sex those fat guys would have if they weren’t powerful men is through rape or with no one at all.
Well, to be fair, plenty of women do happily fuck ugly, sweaty guys. But no woman wants to be raped, no matter who is doing the raping.
Mr. Insanity clarified that what he meant by sexual slavery for men involved being sexily enslaved by women, not men.
I get what you’re saying but that isn’t a direct analog. Enslaved women are forced to fuck men, generally not forced to fuck women. I know that in reality, male sex slaves would also be taking dick but, for illustrative purposes, my analogy assumes the male sex slaves equivalent would be forced to fuck women.
And what man wouldn’t like that?
“I think most men wouldn’t mind being raped by women at all,” chirped someone called Frankenstein’s M, who has evidently never spoken to any man who actually has been raped.
For his part, Mr. Insanity was simply incredulous that anyone could possibly think that “fucking somebody you’re not attracted to = forced backbreaking labor.”
I have no words left at this point, so here’s a gif that, while wildly overused, pretty much nails my reaction right now better than anything else out there.
I’m going to go lie down for a while.
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I know that that they pay as much attention to historical facts as any other fact, but seriously. None of these yahoos have ever cracked open an American history book? Cause I distinctly remember mine having several pictures of black slave – including black women- picking cotton in the fields.
Just – wtf dudes?
Why is it that every time I think to myself “damn, these guys are dumb,” a bunch of them seem compelled to say “hold my beer”?
@ Gaebolga:
Iknowwhatyamean… I saw a Slate piece on one of the dumpster fire’s press secretary calling Puerto Rico “that country” and I spontaneously wished for Barry Goldwater…. 🙁 🙁
Yeah, none of these twits would survive a day of labor performed by an average 19th century woman, let alone a slave. If any of these nitwits think slave women have it easy, they should read Sojourner Truth’s memoir: The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave.
I feel dirty after reading that. I think I’ll go and take a nice long, hot shower.
Never mind that female slaves were also often made to the same back breaking labor as men, plus they were also force to bare the other indignity of getting raped, in addition to that, sometimes by their white male masters. Also anyone who thinks that being a “sex slave” would be an easy, pleasurable life, its safe to say has never been raped, either that or they’re some type of extreme masochist.
The fuck is this incel nonsense?
+30 to Gaebolga
As for critical dragon, you are right on with this bit:
Of course, as David said,
@Crip Dyke
Racism, sexism and ignorant of history. The trifecta of unattractive personality traits.
TW//torture, rape, slavery, etc
Man, I’m a 19th century historian. I work on New Orleans. I can tell you horror stories about so-termed “fancy girls” who were light-skinned and sold explicitly for sex, sometimes to individual masters, but more often to brothels.
Enslaved women on plantations were more often than not field hands, as house workers weren’t as necessary to the daily life of the plantation if there was a mistress who did a lot of physical labour. (It wasn’t all Scarlett O’Hara, you know, mistresses just had to make it look like it was.) These enslaved women were worked to the bone, 12-16 hours a day, raped, forced to endure work until the moment they were giving birth (usually through labour), and then within 48 hours, they were back in the fields and not allowed to feed their own children. Large plantations would have one or two wet nurses who would nurse all the children, enslaved and free, so that enslaved mothers weren’t taken away from work and wouldn’t have their fertility impaired by breastfeeding. An enslaved woman was a breeding investment. If she was a house worker, she was subject to violence from the mistress who saw in her evidence of the master’s infidelity. Mistresses were infamous for being the cruelest on the plantation with a whip. There’s records of mistresses killing light-skinned enslaved women in fits of rage, and punished by their husbands for wasting a breeding resource, not for killing a human being.
Within brothels, especially in New Orleans, light-skinned women were often treated as breeding machines, as “fancy girls” went for the highest premium on the slave market. They were a luxury good, and if they could produce more light-skinned children, they turned an even greater profit than their labour as sex workers. And if they weren’t bred, they were forced into chop job abortions to keep them able to work as sex workers for the brothels instead of taken off the sexual market whilst pregnant. But sure, that’s a delightful way to live, especially the part where the women were sold off to sugar or indigo plantations when they were too old for breeding or to be sexually desired, and those plantations were known to have an average survival rate for healthy young males of about 3-9 months. Totes easy mode.
But these assholes have never read first-hand accounts of slave markets, memoirs of escaped enslaved people, or the horrors experienced by enslaved children who were primed to be breeding stock because they turned out to be light-skinned girls for the young white men they’d grown up alongside on the plantations. Anyone who thinks any form of slavery, especially sex slavery, is an “easy mode” is a fucking cabbage who deserves to be drop-kicked repeatedly into a concrete wall.
Academic rant over. For now.
@ Alex, and, really, everyone else….
Your preachin’ to the choir. These assholes don’t know, don’t care, don’t wanna know.
You all already have the history fail part covered, so I’ll just add this
I recently found out how part of the system for training slave children (i.e., making sure they knew they were subhuman) was denying them underwear, and often proper clothing altogether, until they were old enough to work, keeping them properly ashamed. I’m sure that was worse for the boys. /s
Strange how if you actually look at the history of slavery, the idea that one sex or the other had it easier doesn’t seem to come up:
(Anthony S. Parent Jr. and Susan Brown Wallace, “Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery.”)
I suppose this incel idiot would seize on the following point to support his argument:
Except, of course, that at a guess this incel is white, and would therefore have to deal with the fact that all the disenfranchisement was due to white people. As Parent and Wallace succintly put it,
OK, that was… a lot more quoting than I expected. Sorry, just found that paper, which is fascinating, and it seemed relevant.
TL;DR: Since incels view women as sex-dispensing machines or breeding cattle anyway, it’s no surprise that they’d think women had it easier under slavery, since in that view slave women being treated as breeding cattle would be perfectly normal, while male slaves are clearly being oppressed.
@Rabid Rabbit
If you haven’t read Smallwood’s “Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora,” which talks a great deal about the dehumanisation process of the Middle Passage, I think you would find it a fascinating read. It’s hard reading, but important and good. Same for Berry’s “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation.” It’s an essential companion to “The Half That’s Never Been Told” as far as understanding how market forces drove slavery and made the bodies of enslaved people into commodities.
@Alex:
Thanks! I’d have asked, but my list of books to read on the subject is already pretty long, so… I’m currently on the Genovese Mind of the Master Class, and I’ve got no idea how long it will take me to finish it. Especially since slavery is a sideline rather than a full-on subject of study for me, and the Genovese book is fairly hefty.
The thing that I have the most trouble wrapping my head around?
Plenty of the child slaves were the owner’s children.
And yet they were treated as cattle.
This happened on a large scale.
Why don’t these men just date other men? It was a rhetorical question. I know why, because they are deeeeeeeeeeeep in the closet.
I’ve seen men complain about how camgirls/snapchat girls are “living on easy mode”. You could do this too, you know! You could be a sex worker, etc. But that would mean taking control of their lives and they wouldn’t get to bitch, complain, and feel sorry for themselves all the time.
Are they going Gor all over again ?
These people are such a bottomless pit of awful.
In Roman slavery, there were some number of slaves who lived ok-ish lives, but it was usually men who got slavery on easy mode – doing the type of work they might have done if they were free – some of it pretty cushy and white collar or whatever the be-toga’d equivalent might be. But that is not to say they wouldn’t have preferred to be free or that there weren’t vastly more men and women who lived squalid, hopeless, violence prone lives.
It’s always possible to find an example of a slave who experienced some measure of kindness and didn’t have to spend 18 hours in back-breaking manual labour- whatever gender. But it’s never possible to find a system of slavery that doesn’t result in brutality and tragedy for the vast, vast majority of slaves and the dehumanisation of all who touch the system. To think otherwise is ignorance or evil.
These people disgust me.
Two words: Fuck. Off.
I’m used to reading their nonsense and mostly laughing at it, but this one caught me on the raw. If this is a binary choice (which, as other commentators point out, it isn’t) I would far rather do 12 hours of back breaking labour a day than be raped.
Thanks to everyone in this thread – especially but not only Alex, Rabid & Ruby. I love learning new things.
@wehgurhg
Oh hey, it has been literally a couple of months since the last time the unpleasant issue of deciding that assholes are “in the closet” raised its ugly head. Oh well, I knew it wouldn’t last.
Don’t do it. It isn’t funny.
Don’t do that either. Have a quick reread of the comments policy, as you seem to have missed at least one important bit of it.
How can they keep getting worse and worse? (Rhetorical question.)
@Alex: Thank you for the historical references and info.
When I was 7 or 8, my parents gave me Julius Lester’s “To Be a Slave”—a short collection of excerpts from Henson and Northrup and other slave narratives, with commentary by Lester. (Meant for kids, though probably a bit older than me, so sexual slavery wasn’t discussed at length—I’ve had to expand my knowledge as an adult.).
@Knitting Cat Lady
You & me both.
And I also have a lot of trouble with the way cattle and other animals were — and are — treated.
Something else I have trouble with: Thomas Jefferson had a long sexual (and romantic?) relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, who had six children with him. He remains one of the USA’s most lauded presidents.
It’s stunning what the human brain can rationalize.