Incel question

Yup. An interesting thought experiment for men who complain about not getting laid is the following:

Would you rather

(a) have amazing hot mutually fulfilling sex with some universally adored beautiful babe, with the caveat that nobody else in the world will ever know about it or believe you if you try to tell them about it, or

(b) have all the guys you know firmly convinced (as well as loudly impressed and envious) that you’ve had hot sex with said beautiful babe, even though in actual fact nothing of the sort ever happened and she’s never even heard of you?

A surprising number of men who are unhappily celibate, particularly young and insecure men, would actually prefer option (b).

To the degree that posters here are basing their speculations on having spent some significant time reading Incel boards I stand corrected.

OTOH I do not think that not leaving equals endorsement. It means they get something out of being there (seems like a maladaptive something but still something) and can at least tolerate the hate, not necessarily that they endorse the hate.

And the comment to Velocity was still strange.

I still do wonder about calling them “a movement”. Is there any reason to believe this is more dysfunctional socially maladaptive misogynistic men than there were before? Has had having something to call themselves and a virtual gathering place to meet increased the numbers or just labeled those who have always existed?

The sites probably don’t exist anymore anyway, for the most part. Back when Reddit still allowed incel boards (they’ve been shut down now, which I think is a shame, because it prevents us from getting a window to view into their minds,) there were black-pillers (who thought things were hopeless,) red-pillers (who were generally the MRA type, but not totally hopeless in viewpoint,) and also they would label people who could get laid, but didn’t (for religious or other reasons) as “volcels” - voluntarily celibate people. But there were still many other types - some who were “just sad that they are lonely,” as you put it - incels who didn’t seem malicious or bitter at all, just melancholy and perhaps crippled by social anxiety or shyness. Plenty of Asperger’s or autistic incels, no doubt.

There were also “ricecels” (incels who complained about anti-Asian discrimination,) “blackcels” (complaining about anti-black discrimination,) “currycels” (complaining about anti-Indian discrimination,) etc. Another part of the incel lingo was “ascension” - if you managed to date a woman, get laid or in a relationship, you had “ascended” out of the incel status. One incel described himself in a news article as a “hopecel” - someone who was still incel but hopeful of better things to come.

But many of these incel men also refused to believe that a woman could be an incel.

Edit: As **raventhief **mentioned, there was also the term “suicide fuel” in reference to posts that showed other non-incel men getting laid with ease or having the good life women-wise. Like, a rich or famous man who had women throwing themselves at him.

I think if you attend a weekly meeting that ends up being all about, say, how to kill your spouse and how to develop convincing alibis or dispose of the evidence, or where everyone Seig Heiled every comment and wear swastikas, AND YOU KEEP COMING BACK EVERY WEEK, you shouldnt be surprised if people question your devotion to your spouse or suggest maybe you’re a Nazi.

Yeah, maybe the wife killing meeting fills some need you have that isn’t related to killing your wife, and maybe you just really like the coffee the Nazis serve.

But if the chief point of being there is to exchange derogatory comments and revenge fantasies about women (as well as hating on themselves for supposedly not measuring up to some invented “standard” of evolutionary “fitness”), then how does not leaving qualify as anything but endorsing the hate?

Well, AFAIK both of those phenomena could qualify as a “movement”. A social “movement” is simply a bunch of people getting together in some way as a response to what they see as a social problem. That can mean either that they’re converting/radicalizing people who originally disagreed with them, or that they’re providing an identifying label and a sense of solidarity for people who already shared the same views. Or some of each.

Really? Because with only the barest minimum of googling, you can find yourself at the notorious former incels.me, now at incels. is (space-broken url to avoid inadvertent linkage). I just this minute looked at their page and here are the initial posts of threads at the top of various forums:

I mean, yeah, guys like this are a tragic mess, but they are also a hate-filled tragic mess encouraging one another’s hatred and rage. This is not just sad and lonely singles: this is a toxic stew of nihilism and misogyny born of a rancid sense of entitlement.

Platform he should use? Like… To stream his hatred?

An “incel” is not a person, but an identity that had been created through online discourse. Incels exist only because of the internet. It’s not like all of sudden all these men suddenly couldn’t get all the sex they want. There have always been people who are sexually frustrated.

So no one needs to imagine anything, boogeyman or otherwise. One need only read what they write online, because that is what constitutes an “incel,” to the degree that it is anything.

Yikes. I read a bit about it when Rogers went on his murder spree, but haven’t keep up.

Japan has herbivores men, guys who have given up on the idea who’d finding women, but there isn’t the hatred.

That doesn’t actually surprise me. I have known a bunch of happily uncelibate (is that a word?) men, both young and old who would likely choose B. They tend to be insecure, looking for external validation.

I had to go look up what a “roastie” is. And now I wanna die.

Yeah, they’re iteration Oggette knows how many of “all women are whores except for my sainted mother (who is a virgin lalalala I can’t hear you), my wife (when I’m not mad at her, at which point ‘whore’ is one of the things I call her) and my daughters (production of any grandchildren notwithstanding)”. Any woman who rejects them does so, not because she’s not interested, but because she’s playing hard to get in order to squeeze more money out.

Many of those guys find particularly inconceivable that a married woman will say no: after all, if she gets preggers there’s a husband who’ll be assumed to be the father, so what’s her problem uh?

At the risk of inviting ire, I personally get the mentality. Relationships are a powerful symbol of put-togetherness. Everywhere one turns, this symbol is reinforced. It’s perpetuated everytime a nosy relative asks “Do you have a girlfriend yet?”

Incels are very much a product of the social media phenomenom, in which people are literally scored based on how socially connected they are and compete over how cool their highlight reels are. Old fogies may be sufficiently detached such that they don’t experience social media as a battle royale of status symbols. But young people aren’t so immune. And this is the only world they know.

The prototypical Incel is mediocre across the board. They aren’t star athletes. They aren’t serious academicians. Often they’ve been burdened by various neurological and psychiatric diagnoses. They may not be that bad-looking, but they haven’t been socialized by their peers to make the most of their physical appearance. Yes, people like this have always existed, but back in the day, people like this would have been forced to get out and socialize like a “normie” due to the lack of any other alternative. And by doing so, most would have found a way to deal. Nowadays, it isn’t anything to hole up in one’s bedroom and “socialize” in maladaptive way. And their parents put up with it because “Hey, at least we know where he is” and “What harm could come from posting on the internet all day? It’s just words.”

I’m saying all of this not because I ooze sympathy for the Incel, but because I’m tired of people acting like Incels are just fucked-up individuals operating in a vacuum. No, we’ve got Incels because our society provides fertile ground for them. If we want Incels to go away, we’ve got to change how we raise children who are at-risk for social marginalization. The social interventions that worked 30-50 years ago probably aren’t good enough since social media didn’t exist back in the day.

I don’t think it’s strange to have a movement of maladaptive young men, but the ideaology they embrace varies by time and place. In this time and place, it carries more overt self-loathing, more hatred of women as objects, and a weird “scientific” dogma that makes it very hard to help people. They don’t think they deserve help. They think that anyone attempting to help is a beta cuck who can’t accept the inarguable scientific facts. Anyone trying to help them will, by that act, generate even more scorn, which sparks the self-loathing, which sparks more resentment. It’s a mess.

Correct me please but my impression has been that the sexism and misogyny is more, as is the case for much in Japanese culture, codified and mainstream. Men read anime with graphic violence against women openly on the subways.

What **monstro **said. You can’t have a society in which sex and relationships are portrayed as desirable, in which men who get laid are considered winners and those who can’t are considered losers, and toss in natural hormones, libido, etc. into the mix and ***not ***expect some to be pissed off about it. It makes as little sense as tossing a chunk of sodium into water and then acting surprised when the sodium explodes - that’s simply the natural product of putting such a volatile mix together.

I find this position very interesting even if I am not yet convinced of its accuracy completely.

I agree that “people like this” always existed but don’t know that that they ever got out and found a way to deal. I think they stayed hidden and isolated in their depressed self-loathing and resentment. They had no one to talk to and no one who would listen. They were, to the rest of us, invisible, even as they worked and walked among the rest of us.

Invisible people often want to be seen and heard. Social media has given them an audience of people who are also resentful of what others have and self-hating that they don’t have it. That audience, that membership in a group, is a powerful thing to get. Self-hate and turning the hate outwards are easy to combine given no alternative and adopting the norms of a group you feel part of is hard to not do.

But I completely agree with your conclusion.

Preventing more from adopting the group membership requires more than pointing out how bad they are. And not sure but Mando JO may be right that those who already have the identity are too far gone to reach.

I would argue it’s less driven by hormones than ego.

I’d also point out women’s hormonal issues were used to disqualify them from a lot over the centuries, and it’s amusing to see how for men it’s a pass for a LOT of bad behaviour.

Kind of how drunkenness mitigates responsibility for sexual assault for the male aggressor but condemns the female victim.

I’m sorry.

Change “Kind of how” with “Exactly like how” and that last sentence is 100% spot-on.

Note that I did not say all social weirdos from “back in the day” found a way to deal. Back in the day, social deviants were thrown into mental institutions or they lived sad Boo Radley-like existences. Maybe they were sent to reform school and became criminalized. Or they were drafted into war, where being a social dingus made them a prime candidate for cannon fodder.

But alternatively, many social weirdos were able to find status by joining the military or getting a good factory job right out of high school. Earning only minimum wage in the 1960s and 1970s was not a barrier to an independent “grown up” lifestyle. So yeah, you might not be getting any play, but at least you’ve got your own place. You’ve got your own wheels. You’ve got a job. You’ve got status symbols, is what I am saying. And maybe you eventually do find a companion in a pre-feminist woman who is fine with the bare minimum in a partner and doesn’t care so much that you have the emotional intelligence of a cold potato.

But nowadays, we’ve got 20-somethings who aren’t socially weird who are struggling to acquire basic symbols of success. People with college degrees, friends and significant others, and the ability to pass a personality test are struggling just to move out of their parents’ house. But at least they have friends and significant others, right? At least they can flash their social worth on insta. The guy with only minimum wage job prospects and zero friends ain’t got nothing to flash. He ain’t taking selfies with pretty girls. He ain’t taking pictures of him and his boys hitting the club. He ain’t flashing “bae” pics of his sleeping girlfriend. He also isn’t living in his own place or driving a car he bought with his own money. He feels very much like a child and a nobody…except when he logs onto the Incel forum and gets validation for his violent trash talk.