this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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As someone who was previously involuntarily celibate, I have to say that this comment really misses the actual problem, which is mental health. I had basically been suffering from some combination of depression, social anxiety, and high functioning autism from around age 8. This didn't leave me with much in the way of friends or social skills, but it didn't reduce in the slightest the horniness I felt.
To me, trying to figure out how to get women to have sex with me felt like dying of thirst on a desert island covered in land mines. In my constantly precarious mental and social situations, I was always terrified of trying anything because I feared that doing the wrong thing would lose me the few friends (ie, acquaintances who tolerated me) that I had. And I feared that letting on to anyone that I had any sexual interest in anyone ever - that I had any sexual urge at all - would lead to everyone I knew immediately abandoning me. And this, I was quite sure,would result in my own death via suicide. This was the case to the point that, one time, my friends asked me if I was gay, probably assuming I was closeted. They were right. I was closeted. I just wasn't gay.
So since I couldn't talk to anyone in real life about my problem, I turned to the internet. I ended up in /r/seduction and..... was immediately grossed out. It was weird and manipulative and unnatural and and just generally unappealing to me as someone who was committed to treating other people with basic human dignity. So instead I turned to the normal/liberal/leftist side of the internet, which was... unhelpful to say the least.
Saying that it is voluntary assumes that the steps needed are straightforward and obvious. But you might as well say that primitive tribes were voluntarily living without electricity for 200,000 years. After all, you just have to spin a magnet! Just put the work in! What's wrong with them?
This is a social problem, so the solution is to look at what successful people do and copy that. If that's not straightforward and obvious, then nothing is straightforward and obvious. This is exactly the same thing primitive tribes did, and every one of your ancestors did. It is a process of learning, which makes it similar to science, but it requires no knowledge that you can't get from just personal observations, completely unlike electricity.
You say that you couldn't talk to anyone IRL about your problem, because of your social anxiety and autism, but that's also a matter of effort. Rather than working on overcoming your social anxiety first, you went straight to seduction. That's skipping all of the groundwork, and you knew it at the time. Choosing a plan that is guaranteed to fail is a voluntary choice.
This is how the pick up artist community started. Be careful what you wish for.
Literally just saying how things are, not how I wish them to be. The straightforward and obvious solution for one person is often not the best, in general. But it's still a solution for that person.
Then the question becomes (1) who is successful? Most people are not advertising every romantic encounter they have. Least of all to the weird kid who doesn't talk to anyone. (2) Of the things they do, what makes them successful? Many of the black pill incels seem to have found the answer here, which is "be tall" and "have a strong jawline". This is similar to questions about "how can I be well liked?" or "How do I make oodles of money?" There are a million possible answers, each as plausible-sounding as the last, all contradictory. And following any one line of advice requires a significant commitment of time and resources before you see results. (3) What do they actually do? It is very rare to actually see someone ask someone else out on a date, or go for a first kiss, or to hear how they flirt on a first date. These are private things, and therefore are difficult to emulate.
This very much was not obvious to me at the time. I was also working on my social anxiety and social skills, but any sort of solid framework or set of steps where one thing led to another was completely opaque to me. Meanwhile, it took me about a decade after I realized that I needed to improve the way I connected with others until I actually managed to get laid - a lot of that time I was a teenager where it was unlikely to happen anyway, so let's cut that time in half and say 5 years. Can you really say that spending 5 years overcoming social anxiety, while agonizing over your lack of a sex life is a voluntary lack of sex? If someone spends a decade struggling with depression and couldn't get a job, would you say they were voluntarily unemployed during that time?
Seriously, the idea that there is no such thing as "involuntary" celibacy because you can just work on yourself completely misses the fact that these people have real problems.
I was talking about effort being key, and these questions obviously come from somebody who didn't even try. All you have to do is lift your head up and shift your eyes slightly and actually look at what other people are doing. I know this stuff doesn't come naturally to an autistic person, and so it requires even more effort. Did you try to find a self-help book for how to improve your social skills? It's not like this is a new problem. Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936, and I doubt you're older than that.
It's not about voluntary/involuntary at that point. In my original analogy, if you practiced basketball for 3 weeks, you might not make the team, but you wouldn't call that "involuntary". You just hadn't put in the required effort. Calling it "involuntary" makes it somebody else's fault, as if it wasn't up to you. But it's not the basketball coach's fault that you didn't make the team. And it's not women's fault that you were unhappy with your sex life. It was your own bad previous decisions that caused it. If you failed a math test because you didn't study, you wouldn't say that you "involuntarily" failed it. This is true even if you didn't understand that you needed to study. We simply don't use the word "involuntary" in that way.
The truth is the truth, whether it makes people feel bad or not. Almost everybody has problems, and they all still have to figure out how to live their own lives. Because most people realize that they need to do something themselves to achieve their goals, and they can't simply shift the blame on to others.
I did try that actually, and I've read that book several times. Each time I come back to it because "it's a classic", and each time I roll my eyes at how trite, unhelpful, and sometimes manipulative the advice is. It's a parade of funny tidbits that an already social person noticed about the way they already acted. It is, quite simply, not a good book on learning social skills or overcoming social anxiety. At all. Which is kind of my point - if this is the book on the topic that everyone recommends, and it is such hot trash, then someone who doesn't know what they are doing is gonna have a hard time figuring out what to do. Of course, there are other books - but now the floodgates are open, and you now must wade through thousands of books on social skills, social anxiety, becoming confident and charismatic, the brain chemistry that causes your depression, how a new diet can fix your mood issues, how it's all in your head, it's not about how you act but how you dress, about 500 different inspirational figures who overcame their own neuroticism and became captains of industry, etc. Soon you are more messed up and turned around than you were before you started.
If I am walking through the forest and a sink hole opens up underneath me, and I fall in and can't get out, I am involuntarily in that hole. Not everything has to be someone's fault. Sometimes things are just shitty.
I never blamed women for my sex life. Mostly because blaming half the human population for something is silly - there is no way that many people could effectively coordinate to conspire against me. I also never blamed any particular woman for not being interested in me - after all, there were many women I was similarly uninterested in, and though I didn't understand exactly what was unappealing about me, I accepted that they could have their own preferences and were entitled to that.
What I did do was develop a complex about how I was fundamentally broken as a human being which led me to consistent suicidal ideation throughout my adolescence. So, I mean, that was fun.
Ah yes, my terrible previous bad descion of being bullied and socially ostracized as a child. Thank you for telling all the 8 year olds out there that the fact that they have no one they feel they can trust in their lives is their own fault.
A more apt analogy would be if you failed a reading test because you have dyslexia which was never diagnosed and for which you never received appropriate support. And then the school just kept pushing you through the grades as you failed every single test and fell further and further behind.
Well sure. But I'm not going to tell a subsistence farmer in Sierra Leone that they are voluntarily poor because they could just risk life and limb to illegally immigrate to Europe and then work there until they can finagle legal citizenship, get a job as a janitor and work their way up the corporate ladder until they are CEO of BMW. And I'm not going to tell someone with only one leg that they voluntarily can't walk on two legs, since clearly they could just make their own fully functional prosthetic just like Boston Dynamics made. Yeah, everyone is living a life, and they can't expect sweet baby Jesus to just step in and solve all their problems. But at the same time, having problems isnt the same as choosing to have those problems which is what "voluntary" means.
That's not how we use the word, though. Nobody calls that "involuntary" if it's just a hole that happened to be there. If somebody put you in the hole, then it's involuntary. The way "involuntary" is used in English, there is a connotation of an entity with a will that overrides your will.
If How to Win Friends isn't a good book, then read a different one. There are even ones about relationships for autistic people now. Don't complain that there are too many. That's why we have ratings. When you say "the floodgates are open", you're just trying to blame somebody else for your lack of effort.
But from your description of it, I can tell that you didn't actually try How to Win Friends. IIRC, the first lesson is "smile". Then, there are other lessons like, "practice giving genuine compliments" and "use people's names when talking to them." Literally, all you have to do is follow the instructions, and you'll have better results. But it sounds like you rejected the advice without trying it. Or in other words, no effort, blame the author and the people who recommended it. It's really the same thing over and over.
You literally described it that way in your first comment: "trying to figure out how to get women to have sex with me". You could have said, "trying to figure out how to have sex with women," but you didn't. You phrased it that way because that's how you think about it. You blamed the women, and you still do.
But boy howdy. You really want to compare yourself to starving subsistence farmers in Africa?
Overall, there is a lot of dishonesty in your last comment. I'm trying to figure out whether it's that you simply refuse to admit the truth to yourself, or if you're doing it intentionally.
The reason the term "involuntary" is used is to differentiate from voluntary celibates, like Catholic priests, who the cultural zeitgeist most readily associates with the word "celibate". You're reading too much into it.
So you are saying I'm lazy, and also misogynistic... Seems weirdly antagonistic for what is essentially a semantics argument. Like, seriously, I'm giving you my personal lived experience, and you're putting words in my mouth and calling me names. You're clearly getting way too worked up over this, so I'm gonna end this conversation before your temper tantrum gets worse.
People often intentionally use the wrong words when describing themselves when using the correct words makes them sound bad. "pro life" "national socialism" are a couple of well-known examples.
The first person who used the term "involuntary celibate" was using it for sympathy, not accuracy. "Involuntary" was never the correct word because "celibate" wasn't the correct word, as "celibate" has the connotation of being a choice. They used the wrong term because something like "sexless" doesn't get sympathy.
I probably shouldn't have talked about "you" so much, but the reason I did is that you are talking not only about yourself, but about the subject, and I realized that you haven't actually changed, and that you still need help. And I don't remember calling you any names. And I'm not putting words in your mouth. I am literally quoting you. I am using your choice of words to expose you to yourself.
If you're fat it's your fault. Just look at thin people and do the same, it's easy.
I said it was about effort. Do you think "effort" means "easy"?
You're talking about old times and primitive tribes which had cohesion and helped people. Nice try though.