Incels

 DZ has, in his geriatric naivety has only recently come across the concept of "incels". And gone down the rabbit hole of various misogynistic groups. Quite an education. A simple web search will turn up countless stories about how unpleasantly these guys can behave.

DZ thinks that the emergence of these people, who seem to have no social skills at all may have something to do with the way people socialise and communicate in today's world.

When DZ was a teenager, the only real ways to communicate were by letter, phone or face to face. But mostly face to face. And with face to face communication there is so much more than the spoken word. Facial expression, vocal intonation, and body language all conveyed information that transcended the simple spoken word. If we said something that the other person found uncomfortable or inappropriate, this non verbal feedback would be picked up, and cause the speaker to modify his behaviour, without any overt expression of discomfort. And in this way we learned social skills. Clearly some didn't but my recollection is that these people were less common than now. Even on the phone vocal intonation would provide some feedback, and writing a letter was such a slow process that it gave the writer time to think about what he was saying.

Today, such a lot of communication is by the unsupplemented  written word, written in haste and sent instantly. Without any non verbal feed back the speaker has no inkling of how his words are received and we sink into a world of unrestrained messages, eventually crossing the line into abuse. Social skills are not acquired, and incels are born. A generation, mostly of males, who feel towards women nothing but a sense of entitlement and rage when their expectations are not met.

Every possible grievance imaginable is directed towards women as a result of this justifiable rejection of these male misfits. 

But one in particular struck DZ funnybone. Paradoxically for men who are not getting sex, is their insistence that condoms are unacceptable in sex. And in their fantasy world one of the reasons is that they are so well blessed that no condom made can accommodate their prodigious manhood.

DZ remembers once, many years ago being at a party where there was a competition to see who could stretch a condom the most without breaking it. This young lady was the winner.