Yeah I don't understand why incels are seen as evil. Young men that have limited success with women don't always hate women they long for a deep meaningful relationship like everyone else. Most will never turn violent. I get that it's bad for society to have large numbers of incels but it weird how unsuccessful men are now assumed to be woman haters.
Things are improving, but male suicide rates are high for a reason. Society just isn't calibrated to allow men to be as emotional as women.
Within every Incel is someone who's life has gone down a dark path. I bet a lot of them are doing it just to belong - having no friends hurts a lot more when you're young, schoolchildren can be really horrible to eachother.
You and other posters in this thread are reacting negatively because you don't like the idea of incels being depressed. You would prefer if they were just sociopaths.
I think the article is right, though. To me it seems clear that incels are mostly depressed and/or socially anxious young men. Mental illness isn't an excuse for bad behavior but it's helpful to know where this behavior is coming from.
Far from all Incels are antisocial. An incel is just a (typically young and male) nonbreeding human of breeding age. Most species have them. Human societies in the past got around the problem a little by discouraging polygamy and shifting enough risk of death onto men only that men were a minority and likely to breed by default if they made it into adulthood. Modern society doesn't like fifteen year olds dying in farming accidents or warfare, so there are a lot of men involuntarily celibate instead. But that category covers a huge range of situations and behaviors. It's just become associated with the antisocial subset because it's an effective insult - by definition, no one wants to be incel.
Inceldom is an extremist manifestion of a growing epidemic of loneliness. Frankly, they have nothing to do with this actual discussion, and stifle discussions around male loneliness.
>is that they’re fucking creepy.
That's the point. They're different. What does creepy mean? Difficulty with social norms? Unusual interests? Physical unnatractiveness? You think these are choices? Incels are just especially self aware and bitter "geeks" and "nerds" of yore, back before those terms were coopted by the mainstream.
I think these men are bitter because they exist with the same needs for romance that you and I do, but have no realistic way of actualizing these desires. Their pain is involuntary and real. Look past the vileness of their rhetoric and understand that they are suffering.
I agree with most of this (though "Toxic Masculinity", like "Triggers," "Privilege," and so many others, is a phrase that used to be useful and has now been utterly destroyed by the socially fashionable).
The general "response" to the incel phenomenon seems to be to diagnose (and dismiss) them as the sexual version of anorexics: people who have an unrealistically negative view of their sexual appeal and potential and end up harming themselves as a result. If they could just stop being so hard on themselves and relax, they'd be fine!
This is a problem for two reasons. First, a lot of people genuinely are seriously, perhaps even hopelessly impaired in terms of finding a sexual partner. Appearance, money, and the ability to navigate a host of social and psychological interactions are vital to the process, and some people lack enough of these that their ability to find a partner is slim to none, and will not be improved by a few personal tweaks. The situation is similar to depression: everyone has felt down at some point and gotten over it with simple coping strategies, so they inevitably suggest these strategies to depressed people, not realizing they're dealing with a much deeper problem.
But second, the real issue, as demonstrated in the discussion here, is that a large portion of the population has an unhealthy obsession with having a sexual partner. They view it both as an unqualified good and as a necessity, and are thus terrified of going without it for any significant period of time. For these people, you are not complete as a person unless you're in a relationship. This is a profoundly unhealthy and destructive way to live life, even for ordinary people.
Relationships CAN be good. They can also be bad. On the whole, they generally end up creating almost as many problems as they solve (and sometimes more!). Having a partner is optional. It isn't like air or water or good nutrition. You have to find peace within yourself, with yourself, before anything else. Trying to fix that with any outside thing, including sexual or romantic partners, is a recipe for disaster.
This thread is full of people continuing this warped line of thinking. Relationships aren't evil, they can be good and they can have positive effects on people. But they aren't necessary, and they won't fix you. Only you can fix you.
In short, our culture very clearly has an addiction to sex and romance. Not in the dopamine sense, but because we believe the answer to our problems lies in someone else. In people with the ability to feed this addiction you get mild to moderate problems. In people without that ability, you get incels. Incels are just the most extreme symptom of a deeper disease.
I didn't realize how much of HN overlapped the incel 'community'. Really an eye-opening and depressing thread. Do so many young men really think this way?
I made the mistake to read the comments on the article, and am shocked of some people's comments (who are obviously not only incels but mentally disturbed). The incels community is a hate breeding ground that can cause real violence in the real world. Some guy aspires to the success of what he calls the dark triad traits: psychopathic, Machiavellian and narcissistic gives examples of such men who had success with women: Ted Bundy, Hitler, etc.. Mind boggling.
Any male "incel" who could have sex with other men but doesn't because they insist on being heterosexual is not a real incel. They have options; they just aren't man enough to exploit them.
I'm a guy who has, for my entire life, struggled to form romantic relationships. For a long time, I also struggled to form friendships. So I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about this, and here are my thoughts:
The term "incel" is used to mean two wildly different things:
- One meaning is "an incel is someone who's single and complains about it". Statistically, a few percent of 30-year-old men are virgins. Some of those are for religious reasons, but a lot of them are involuntary. So in this sense of the term "incel", I'd guess there are somewhere around a million male incels in the US today.
- The other meaning is "an incel is a misogynistic asshole who uses terms like Chad/Stacy/femoid". This is a _much_ smaller group; I doubt there are more than a few thousand people active on incel forums.
A lot of people conflate these two groups, and that's very unfair to the former group. There's been a lot of discussion of the latter group, because they're dramatic and highly visible. But the former group is actually much larger; they just aren't as visible, often because the sufferers try to hide it. We need to talk about the former type of "incel" -- people who are lonely and suffering, but haven't done anything wrong!
My theory for how people get into this situation, is that they get stuck in a vicious cycle of impaired social skills:
1. For some reason, they don't have age-appropriate social skills.
2. Because they lack social skills, their peers don't want to interact with them.
3. Because they don't interact with their peers, they don't develop social skills.
When the problem gets bad enough, social interactions become traumatic. The sufferer learns that every time they try to interact with other people (whether romantically or not) they'll receive cold stares and harsh rejection. So they become scared to even try to interact with people, which makes it even harder to escape the cycle.
Many different things can potentially trigger this cycle. Sometimes it starts with something like autism that biologically impairs their social skills. Other times there's nothing biologically wrong with them, but their peers shun them for some reason, and then it becomes self-reinforcing.
There are no easy solutions to this problem. In particular, there certainly aren't easy solutions that are accessible to the people suffering from the problem; if there was an easy way out, they would have done it already! Therapy can help, but it's slow, expensive, inconvenient, and not guaranteed to work; so it's a poor substitute for "not being traumatized in the first place". I think the real solution will have to involve changes in society's attitude towards socially awkward people:
- For one thing, we absolutely need to stop conflating the "raging misogynist" meaning of the word "incel" with the "man who's lonely" meaning of the word "incel". Lonely men should be able to talk about their suffering without people acting like they're misogynists.
- For another thing, we should be kinder and more sensitive to socially awkward men when they try to make friends, or ask women on dates. Socially awkward people are often unintentionally rude, or accidentally make other people uncomfortable. Some people assume the awkward person is being rude on purpose, and react harshly; this makes it much harder for awkward people to escape the cycle. (Of course, nobody's obligated to be friends with a socially awkward person if they don't want to -- and in particular, women certainly aren't obligated to go on dates when they don't want to -- but I do think people should make an effort to reject socially awkward folks without traumatizing them!)
I see incels as collateral damage from the the Gender Wars. A schism intentionally driven to supplement the broader Culture Wars. I only expect this to get worse and have no idea how it will end.
Incels show up in stats but most everyone is suffering. I do know that victim blaming will continue while we learn the hard way why we had traditions in the first place.
> incels would build confidence and learn to socialize a bit
While there's a perception that incels are ugly, socially awkward nerds, the one's I've interreacted with online (and off) tend to be angry, misogynistic douchebags.
The nerdiest guys I know (IRL) all have significant others. The bitter guys I know (two) IRL are older, have let themselves go and have nothing "going for them". They are both very active online however. This is my personal experience, anecdotal of course.
incel generally isn't used literally to refer to all people who want to have sex but can't, but a male subset of said group who tend to hold really strong beliefs along the lines of "women won't sleep with me because they're bad", "women only like the bad dudes not nice guys like me", etc.
The implication is that society is also very hostile to men and boys right now, demonstrated by them becoming incels in large numbers.
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