There is a tendency in life to think that if someone is unsuccessful in it, it must be their fault. And sometimes it is. Other times, it’s something about the person that they cannot control. Still other times, it’s something about the world that no one can control.
I think there are two extreme points of view when talking Inceldom, both have their problems.
The first extreme point of view is to completely externalize blame. It’s the world’s fault. Women owe men sex. If you wholly buy into that mindset, then you aren’t going to lift a finger to improve yourself and you will stew in a toxic frame of mind.
The other extreme view is to completely internalize blame. It’s my own fault, I just need to try harder! That may work for some, or even most, but it’s not going to work for all. What would you say to someone who has gone on dozens or even hundreds of dates but still hasn’t found romance? What would you say to the Bare Branches of China, the men who can’t find a woman because there’s a numerical shortage of women due to China’s One Child policy and mass female infanticide? Try harder! :dubious: Some people just aren’t going to find that special someone, no matter how hard they try.
The philosopher Epictetus put it best:
Hey don’t pawn these freakshows off on us! Get your sister to date an incel and leave us weird chubby girls alone! 
It won’t completely fill the void all by itself, but it could certainly help.
In the past I’ve been easily able to find platonic female friends. But for whatever reason, this hasn’t translated into a romantic relationship (at least, not for the past 8 years). Having friends is great, but there’s still something missing in my life. Perhaps a robot companion could fill that particular void for me.
It’s like the cereal Lucky Charms. If you just eat the marshallows, you won’t be satisfied. If you just eat the cereal, you also won’t be satisfied. It is only when you have them both together in the right proportions do you have a happy breakfast experience.
Or “D-cells.” A lot of D-cells.
Speaking as that girl, I’m not interested in having sex with people who aren’t nice to other people.
- There’s still time to register for the 4TH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON LOVE AND SEX WITH ROBOTS, or read the book.
Certain aspects cannot really be changed much. Facial structure is largely determined by genetics and how your body formed in the womb. Some people have bad scars. Some people are so overweight that they can only obtain a socially acceptable body by undergoing massive lifestyle changes that many people cannot maintain (surgery combined with really big lifestyle changes).
Also, and this is very important, a big part of the incel community is mental, not physical. A lot of incels don’t look that bad. They just have higher levels of social dysfunction (autism spectrum disorders, histories of abuse, etc). you can’t fix those by going to the gym and changing your clothes. Some of them are incurable, some require years of therapy to just kindof get a handle on.
I’m not really sure you guys understand what I meant. In the incel community there is a sense of despair because of things like the 80/20 rule which basically states women mostly only want the top 20% of guys. And 80% of guys cannot be in the top 20%.
Yeah a guy can dress nice, get a good body, etc. but if every guy does that, then the 80/20 rule just changes to take that for granted. 400 years ago not having boils on your skin, having a bank account and being 5’10" probably put you in the top 20%. Now because almost every guy has that, it doesn’t count for much.
The point is that, yes guys can improve themselves. But if all guys improve themselves, then we are all right back where we started. If you could push a magic button and give every guy on earth an athletes body and 6 pack abs, then in the minds of incels women would just start ignoring the bottom 80% of those men and only want the top 20%.
The fear is that the ‘weird chubby girl’ at the coffee shop is only interested in the top 20% of men even though she isn’t in the top 20% of women.
The things you describe are not common enough to be actual impediments to success with the opposite sex for a substantial number of people. Only a very small percentage of us have faces that are seriously so abnormal or scarred, or are so morbidly overweight, that they would be a significant obstacle to them. For all the rest, appearing presentable is a matter of minor cosmetic adjustments.
Well, that’s a distorted way of thinking and it needs to be corrected if they are to have normal lives.
I’m not sure the level of change you describe is even possible. Attending a church would give the opportunity to meet people, and you could go through the motions and sing all the hymns, but that doesn’t make you a starry-eyed christian. It’s a matter of faith. Similarly, you can choose to do housework, but I don’t think you can choose to like housework. There’s a limit to how much we can reinvent ourselves.
If you did all those things, and formed a relationship, do you think you’d be happy? I think I’d feel like a fraud, that I’d tricked someone into being with me, and that they weren’t in love with me, but with the person I was only pretending to be.
And ultimately, what makes you think those are the things holding you back. Plenty of starry-eyed christians find happy relationships, but so do plenty of atheists. Plenty of drinkers find happy relationships, but so do plenty of teetotalers. I don’t think there’s some secret recipe of 11 traits and habits that someone can use to cook up a healthy romantic life. I’ve looked. I’m still looking.
My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. Again.
What I want out of a relationship is more than just sex and cuddling. I also want, for instance, conversation. I want partnership. I want someone who’s willing and able to raise children with me. And maybe someday we will have robots advanced enough to do all of that… but a robot advanced enough to meet my relationship needs is also one advanced enough that it’s relevant whether it wants to be in a relationship with me. At which point, it’s not really any different than the problem of finding a human woman interested in me.
And, honestly, I probably could find a human woman I’m interested in, and who is also interested in me. But I’m not trying very hard right now, because my life’s relatively unstable right now, and I want to put down roots before I start pursuing a relationship. I don’t want to get started in a relationship and then suddenly have to say “oh, by the way, honey, I need to move halfway across the state for that job”.
Saying they feel despair because they embrace bullshit is not really much of an explanation. It’s probably a reversal of actual cause and effect as well.
I don’t want kids, so that’s not a concern for me. I can get conversational companionship easily enough. I can easily find women who are willing to hang out with me and talk. But sex and cuddling not so much. A robot just might be the missing piece for me.
If you actually change what you like and don’t like, it’s not fakery, so that wouldn’t be a problem.
And I never said that changing myself to be appealing to women would be possible - other people here claim that. I’m of the opinion that it’s actually a literal impossibility.
(I’ll just preemptively concede that this perspective is appealing because it’s lazy - changing onesself is impossible, thus there’s no need to try and thus I have more time for those weird hobbies I mentioned.)
Given that I’ve had two-maybe-three relationships die in flames explicitly because of the religion/atheism divide, I’d say I’m justified in thinking it’s holding me back, especially since my location surrounds me with theists.
As for the rest, every aspect of me does hold me back - it reduces the set of women who might potentially be interested in me, because everybody has things they like more or less than other things and some things about me will turn off some people. That’s fair - I have my own turnoffs too. (You have a pet dog - get that thing away from me! AAAAUGH!! Also seriously, no religious ladies. Three strikes and all.)
The situation can be illustrated as a Venn diagram - each circle representing the ladies not repelled or rejected because of some specific attribute. One circle describes ladies who are okay with fat people. Another describes ladies that are okay with non-cooks. Another describes ladies who are okay with men at all. As one does with venn diagrams, you look to the intersection of all circles to find the set of ladies who aren’t repelled by something. And the more circles you have the smaller that intersection will be.
Seems to me that if you’re going to go on the hunt, as it were, a prerequisite of the process would be to eliminate as many circles as possible. I haven’t done that yet, so I can’t reasonably say I’ve done what I have to to be worthy of interest.
To tie my random self-indulgent nonsense back into the topic of the thread, if somebody were to come up with a sex robot with enough intelligence and autonomy to fulfill my needs as a romantic partner, I’m fairly confident she’d dump me. If nothing else I’m pretty sure I’m too much of a prude to satisfy a sex robot.
:dubious: Cite for this “rule”? As a counselor for decades, this is simply not what I see or hear. The whole idea of some percentage that’s the “top” people in some undefined way is a really problematic way to think about other people and relationships. It smacks of fantasy and is objectifying. Most people are desirable in some ways and not in others, and it also depends who you are and where you’re standing. There are no objective criteria.
Yep.
My husband was not attractive (I think he is, but he isn’t typically attractive). When we started dating 25 years ago, he was probably fifty pounds overweight. He was underemployed and had filed for bankruptcy. He is a pretty firm atheist
I was of normal weight, had a good paying job, owned a home, and most people at the time seemed to think I was pretty attractive, and I was a church going Catholic.
And yet somehow, we ended up together. He has a great sense of humor, we share some interests, many friends, and a lot more about the way we look at the world, he is a decent and ethical human being, I can have conversations with him - we still find things to talk about after our quarter of a century together.
He has, in the past 25 years, become very successful professionally, gotten more “distinguished-looking” with age, and weighs about fifty pounds less than when we started dating. While I’ve gained 20 pounds, and women don’t tend to get “distinguished” as we age - we go from “cute” to “sexy” to “old” (unless you are Helen Mirren).
What I find annoying about this thread is that everyone here assumes that the incels are necessarily broken. It’s like blaming people who lost their jobs in the 2008 recession and who couldn’t get a new job for just being bad or unqualified workers. That’s not at all how it works.
Many of the people who lost their jobs in '08 and couldn’t get another weren’t bad workers, they just weren’t good enough compared to the other candidates that employers have to choose from. They were too old, didn’t have enough experience, weren’t as good looking, etc.
Similarly, while some incels may be neckbeards, many of them are not bad men and in a different era they would have a wife or girlfriend.
What everyone in this thread seems to have forgotten is that men have a hard coded preference for slim, young women. Worldwide surveys of sexual preference show it’s one of the few things that men consistently everywhere look for.
Well, today there’s an obesity epidemic. Most men and women in the pool are fat. So if you ignore overweight women, it’s something like 3 men chasing every single woman who isn’t fat. Maybe 5:1 in some areas.
That means 2-4 men aren’t going to be getting any (unless they lower their standards and date fat women, but speaking from experience, it’s difficult to even maintain an erection or any real interest). That’s mathematics and telling those men to try harder is not really going to solve the problem.
In the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, most of the adults were slim. So it’s a different era.
Another factor is Tinder. See, women’s role in this dance is to pick the best source of genes for their offspring. Well, with Tinder, it’s possible for women to find and schedule an efficient mating appointment with a top 10% man. So the top 10% man can stud it up with multiple women, more or less servicing their needs. So, again, if the top 10% of men are satisfying 30% of women in the pool, this means right off the bat, 20% of men aren’t getting any.
Same idea with polygamy in the middle east - every man who gets a n extra wives is stopping n men elsewhere from having a wife.
Anyways, this is reality. Solutions should be grounded in reality. One outlet these men do have, if they can scrape together the $1000 or so a ticket costs, is to take a sex vacation in a country with a very different pool. Czechoslovakia where since all the women are skinny from a different culture and diet, the prostitutes are correspondingly stick thin and due to economics don’t charge much in USD terms. Or Thailand, where a similar market exists along with an enabling culture.
Or, well, maybe we’ll invent sex robots. Or a way to turn fat women skinny, or old women young, or something. This problem is a problem of the immediate era, it won’t be around forever, just like the problem of horse poop in city streets was a short term problem.
Now, yes, the incels do have a negative culture. They don’t understand that the reason that hot woman brushed them off in a dismissive way wasn’t because she’s a bitch, it’s because she has an overwhelming number of much hotter men after her. She literally doesn’t have time to even consider his offer as he’s nowhere close to her league, in the same way that a worker with a rare skill gets tons of offers and has no time to even respond to an offer to work retail.
Well, to start with we’re not all defining “incel” the same. My definition for it is “overt self-identifying member of a hate group who has embraced that group’s ideology that women are all members of an evil cabal to deny men of their god-given right to have female sex slaves”. Such men are indeed necessarily broken - not by their appearance or other attributes, but by their toxic ideology.
As for men who are simply single and unhappy about that, they’re not incels. I’m such man, and I’m not an incel.
I also disagree that this whole situation hinges on appearance, weight, and other physical attributes. Both men and women base their relationship choices on far more things than that - such that even the most stunningly attractive person might have a hard time finding a mate if they talk like an incel.
I was going by “a man of breeding age who is involuntarily celibate for a substantial period of time, on the order of years”
I said that men go by weight and physical appearance. This is a well substantiated fact, would you like to see a cite? Yes, other factors count, but if she’s young and slim and has a vagina he’s going to say yes unless he has a better offer. Women are more complex, but ultimately are going to choose men who have characteristics that are very hard to ‘cheat’. Height and income are two they weight very strongly. It takes a concerted effort and luck over years to decades to substantially increase your income, and you can’t change your height without extreme measures.
You see the source of confusion then.
Personally I don’t think that all such men are necessarily broken, but then I might be biased. (I came by my brokenness with hard work and training, dammit!)
The risk of speaking in absolutes is that you are wrong. (Always!) There are certainly trends in the directions you speak of, but by no means are they absolutes. For example if you show me a hot little number wearing a cross, holding a dog’s leash, and blowing smoke in my face, I am getting the hell out of there. Better offer or not.
I love how the Incel message is that women can get laid no matter what, while your message is that fat women are boner killers.