I think the difference is that you haven’t defined a target female demographic, done your damnedest to get laid by someone in that demographic, failed, and then turned bitter and resentful whole blaming the entire gender for your own failure.
That’s basically an incel to me - the emphasis is on the done your damnedest and the blaming thee gender for your own failure.
You aren’t doing either of those- you don’t seem to be trying, and you aren’t blaming anything on women.
I was thinking about this could this be something of a perversion of the notion that one shouldn’t settle? Which I feel like was meant to reassure people that they didn’t need to compromise on really important things in order to meet external (parents/family/society) expectations for being married or whatever, and to boost confidence in choosing the right person.
Instead it got warped into “I shouldn’t have to compromise *at all *”. Which isn’t a reasonable way to approach romance, dating, or relationships. It lends itself to people having absurd standards, especially when online dating is concerned.
I wonder how much this mentality contributes to incel-ism - these guys feel like they are owed sex from women they seem attractive, and it definitely feels like there’s an element of this sort of unwillingness to compromise.
Seriously IMHO, it’s the entitlement that defines “incels” as a group, rather than the various literal definitions or self-definitions. The requirement that they are owed a woman, meeting their standards of attractiveness, and that “settling” for anything else is beneath them. You can quibble about the exact role they want of the woman, be it servant / wife / sex-object, but it’s the deserve part of the equation that sets them apart.
And because of that, I don’t think there’s quite a female equivalent. Because, based on the substantial male privilege, I don’t think most (I’m sure there are exceptions, as seen in a lot of our online dating threads and this one!) where there’s the same entitlement. Sure, plenty of women aren’t willing to compromise (or say they won’t) on what they want, but they just keep shopping for the most part.
A small, but significant difference in motivation and underlying entitlement.
What the (hetero?) version of male and female whatever-cels share is a loathing of the other gender and contempt for their counterparts who are perceived to easily get dates. Chads and PickMes are considered to be insincere and shallow. Because of privilege and cultural baggage, it’s not a complete analogy but it’s fairly close in my view and both are very toxic and bigoted.
Male privilege is a thing, yet I do think that male and female incels are very similar in key aspects. The main difference lies in what they want to get.
From what I understand, male incels want to f*** dozens of childless, unrealistically perfectly-groomed women at the turn of a switch whenever they want, women who look like top models or anime characters, who will cook, pamper and generally babysit them afterwards, and who will let them indulge in their hobbies, hang out with their friends, or just bedrot without ever complaining.
Female incels want a man with countless elusive, often contradictory attributes, one who can-express-his-feelings-but-never-look-weak, is-at-least-6-foot-tall-but-who-would-never-body-shame-them, treats-them-fully-as-equals-except-when-good-old-chivalry-is-expected, takes-their-opinions-seriously-but-shows-leadership, is-career-driven-but-puts-her-at-the-top-of-his-priorities.
But apart from that, they seem very similar to me. Both male and female incels appear to :
have a grotesquely bloated sense of their “worth”
which leads them to
have pathetically delusional demands about the partner they “deserve”
which in turn causes them to
go predictably from disappointment to more disappointment when reality doesn’t align 100% with their vision (“never settle!”)
leaving them to
simmer in resentment and bitterness
The way I see it, their end goals may be widely different, but the character flaws are exactly the same : entitlement, delusion and denial.
A lot has been made of the whole Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus concept but, for better and sometimes for worse, we have a lot in common.
The aspect of male incels that elevates them from pitiful to terrible is, in my opinion, the tendency toward violence. Not all (or even a majority) go on shooting rampages; but as I understand it, incel communities often cheer on the killers or talk about violent fantasies or otherwise condone, glorify, minimize, and excuse violence against women.
I’m unaware of any female incels who have committed injurious violence due to their ideology.
You can’t attract a partner and it largely stems from a lack of social skills perhaps combined with lack of other factors like looks or status that would otherwise help mitigate the social skills thing. So you feel bad about that, get told that it’s not really your fault, it’s their fault because women are too shallow to recognize a good guy and those other guys are predators taking more than their share and it’s a whole system aligned to keep you single. Which is a lot more attractive to hear than “clean up your act”.
So, on one hand, it’s a low sense of self-esteem that brought you there but then you’re also being told that you’re actually noble and wonderful, deserving of the perfect mate, and it’s everyone else who is flawed trash to be held in contempt.
At least among some younger people, age gaps are red flags. I’ve seen people complain about someone someone who is 28 dating a 22 year old. It seems crazy to me, especially since my father was 10 years my mother’s senior, but disparaging age gaps is a thing now.
I have read both articles. Yes these women were, understandably, angry at men in general. I am not sure how either qualifies as a female incel- especially because they were both lesbians.
That word? So used I don’t really know what it means? Female behaviors has its own “toxicity”. Male behaviors don’t have to be violent to be toxic.
I see similarities in a self perception of being bullied becoming a bullier. Yes major differences with a small number of male incels becoming overtly violent or supporting violence and that less common as a female manifestation.
But the point is being missed: whatever “toxicity” means it does not require a person being violent let alone killing somebody. Most of gets labeled as “toxic masculinity” does not include physical violence, and few of the incel group actually commit violent offense. Being violent is not what defines them or whatever “toxicity” means. A few of them being violent is a problem but not definitional.
Less common as in it’s not happening at all. Unless you have a cite saying otherwise.
Please read my cite. I’ll even help you.
Fowler, Green and Palombi analyzed nearly more 2,700 pages of incel posts from 2019. Their study explores how community members progress from a sense of solidarity to hostile radicalism, where violence is encouraged and sometimes carried out.
“More than 80 percent of the posts was them talking about women and what they would do. A lot of it regarded violence,’’ said Green.
If you want to insist there is an equivalence in female communities, please show it. I actually tried finding it because I thought maybe there was something but I can’t find anything.
And two examples of individuals from 35-70 years ago isn’t showing that there is any kind of equivalence between modern day male and female incel communities.
On the other hand, here is a cite showing that female incel communities don’t do that.
The femcel researchers found that, like incels, femcels struggled with sexual frustration but that the gender dynamics of sex and power made them react differently. Rather than turning their frustrations out onto the world, as with incels, they turned it in onto themselves. Unlike fictional machiavellian femcels like the protagonist of Sweetpea , self-described femcels in real life “were more interested in their own frustrations” and, generally speaking, “exhibited less support for aggression, violence and crime than what has been reported about male incels”.
Where incels blame women for their unhappiness, femcels blame themselves. Femcelism is a response to the patriarchal structures that govern our society, whereas incelism is misogynistic violence that exists within those patriarchal structures. Understandable enough. But while it might be convenient to take this more academic reading as an explanation for the femcel’s internet and cultural prominence, that’s still not the whole story.
That is a lifestyle article, not a study, but I’m not seeing any scholarly studies that show any kind of equivalence, but there are certainly anecdotes showing the opposite. Female incels (or “femcels” as they are sometimes called) are more likely to blame themselves than blame the opposite sex. That is why I said that the biggest difference is rooted in privilege.
Both communities can be toxic in their own way, but in the female community it’s an inward toxicity that is the opposite from the male community.
And none of this should be taken to mean that there aren’t women who have shitty, sexist attitudes about men, who have unrealistic and manipulative approaches to romantic/sexual relationships, who resent the people they’re attracted to. Obviously that’s all true, because people gonna people. But “incel” is a step beyond all that: it’s taking those terrible attitudes and approaches, fermenting it in a toxic community, and brewing up some violence.
You believe that there have been zero murders of men by women who feel wronged? One female murderer of men was already cited in this thread.
I’m sorry but such is a ludicrous position.
Most femicide is not by incels. It is within the context of partnered relationships.
But again you are not responding to what my point was - you are claiming incels are defined by their “toxicity” and that “toxicity” is defined by violence. I do not believe that violence is a prerequisite for being an incel, or even that having violent fantasies as a manifestation of their misogyny is. I am not sure that they feel “privileged” so much as they have a distorted view of reality that self perceives as persecuted and victimized. I think men and women groups both have people who feel that victimization by society writ large.