I’ll be honest, it’s been real weird watching incel manosphere stuff enter public consciousness from its isolated internet origins. Before, I’d been watching interviews with incels and browsing through their subreddits much like watching a car crash, inevitably ending in the subreddit getting banned for sexism (big surprise).  Now ‘incel’ gets used synonymously with ‘sexist dudes’ whilst we have ironic sigma male memes riffing off manosphere-phrenology.

If you’re not terminally online like me, and don’t know what an incel is, it stands for involuntary celibate—a term of both self-description and self-affliction. These are people (often young men) who believe that they are doomed to never find a date. Of course, it isn’t just self-directed doom and gloom—incel ideology also has a unique flavour of sexism which stems from this. They roughly subscribe to some version of the alpha-male/beta-male cosmology in which they’re the hopeless beta-males. The reasons women won’t date them? It ranges from an entire selection of physical features like “suboptimal” jawlines, wrist widths and bone structure to a grand conspiracy that “feminism is ruining women”. Though funny enough, most of their problems, insofar as they track any real phenomena, have more to do with sexism than anything else.

Sure, a big part of it is that manosphere culture has become way more visible in recent times, no doubt signal boosted by Canadian psychologists on YouTube selling their own brand of Jungian, all-meat-diet self-help. But I think that this conversation about Jordan Peterson is mostly overdone. You know the usual: YouTube algorithms and how they target “disaffected young men”, etcetera. 

Still, there’s always something missing from our talk about incels. I suppose it’s because of the way that people see them. We’re always talking about incels as people who happen to hold a collection of bad beliefs. There’s always a sense of ridicule which revolves around that fact that we cannot imagine ourselves believing the same things that they do—fatalism about permanent maidenlessness. I mean how could you believe that?

But we miss so much if we think of inceldom as just bad beliefs. There’s a whole emotional framework deployed amongst incels online that cuts up the world into the ‘Chads’, ‘Stacys’ and incels. The Chads are out there ‘disproportionally dating up all the women’ and the Stacys are too ‘obsessed with dating 10s’. Our poor incels view themselves as the hapless victims in this unfair world, doomed by genetic and social circumstance.  

To think that incels are just people holding silly beliefs captures but a small portion of what it is for somebody to be one. There’s a distinction between holding sexist beliefs, as many incels and non-incels do, and possessing a sexist worldview, as an incel does. For somebody anywhere on the path of radicalisation from normal-ish to self-describing as a woman hater, it might be perfectly accurate to say that this person ‘holds’ no sexist beliefs but that nonetheless they are—in an important way—sexist. Of course, the point at which you hold sexist beliefs or a fully-fledged sexist worldview may as well be the point that you are also being sexist. However, whilst all people with sexist worldviews may ‘see’ the world in a sexist way, not all people who have sexist attitudes have fully developed worldviews.

Missing this, it’s often hard to see why somebody would be an incel to start with. If you give incel forums or subreddits a browse you might see why. There is a set of true facts they keep pointing at, though these facts become entirely misinterpreted. Lookism is a thing and gendered expectations of courtship kinda suck for heterosexual men. Of course, how they latch onto these facts might vary from something like channelling the frustration of having to ask out girls into a “fuck the world” type speech. Or, complaining that it’s “unfair” how (heterosexual) men might rate women in a bell curve whilst women seem to only date those they deem highly attractive. You’ll often hear something like:
“It’s not fair, men rate women proportionately from 1-10 yet dating data shows a huge divide in women’s ratings for men! Women only want to date 10s. It’s either 9-10 or none!”

They’re not exactly wrong in that these things do suck and there is a sense in which this does track something real. Both of these things are holdovers from other parts of sexist culture. Women are still judged by physical attractiveness and men are still judged by other metrics like career stability; so there is something real behind “women never date down”. But, if you look at the posts on these forums attempting to address an “incel-skeptical” crowd, you’d quickly notice that incels go back to circling around and affirming their frustrations. It’s real for them and describes their experiences. It’s not that incels are proceeding with these facts as basic propositions with logical connectors to form a sexist worldview. It’s that they’re being given a framework that centres these frustrations and fits it in a narrative which ‘makes sense’. Any time it appears challenged, they can just point at the indisputable facts, never mind the assumptions and questionable leaps of logic they take thereafter. The indisputability lies in the realness of the emotion tied to the fact. And it’s the solidity of these ‘ground facts’ having this real emotional resonance that makes such a strong formula for ideological staying power.

This is why saying “hey guys, feminists have been working on these men’s issues for ages!” doesn’t seem to work. It’s why you get posts like:
“I went to the gym. I shaved, got a haircut. Nobody wants me still.”

To which responses of: “that’s unlucky” or “clearly you haven’t improved something”, whilst true, probably do nothing to move this perspective.

You can’t convince somebody on mere fact alone, as much as we like to tell ourselves that we came to our positions through pure rational contemplation or a saintly nature in tune with the moral law. Incels aren’t engaged in their worldview merely on the level of factual dispute, it's that these facts ground themselves emotionally in their worldview. Often in (for lack of a better term) woke discourse, there seems to be a lack of engagement with ‘incel frustrations’, where they are waved away or intellectualised. There seems an expectation that being told the facts is all it takes to change your mind, yet just being aware of them isn’t enough does not stop you from trained emotional responses or familiar ways of ‘seeing’ the world.

Dating app data doesn’t wholly reflect straight courtship and half of these guys posting images of their faces lamenting doomed bone structure would honestly look fine if they groomed a bit. It’s not that these are even incel-particular frustrations. Male (especially young male) frustration in courtship has been an ever-green literary genre. It’s just that incels seem to give these frustrations priority in their worldview, whereas elsewhere this kind of stuff just seems silly or something you grow out of. In being given this new worldview, incels are told that not only are their frustrations meaningful, but they are also the key to understanding all of society. They’re handed a one-size-fits-all lens through which everything makes sense.

I’m sure most people can at least relate somewhat with dipping into fatalistic thinking when failing at something. Even something as basic as “damn, I just suck, I’m never going to be good at this”, a phrase you might just say but never entertain seriously. It’s something you know is not true, something you don’t believe—yet the framework is right there. Likewise, with incel ideology, the framework is right there ready to be cultivated and deployed. Given this, it's not that hard to imagine that somebody might dip further into this kind of thinking.

I don’t know what the solution is. “Just accommodate people’s feelings and frustrations” is incredibly unhelpful. But hopefully we can talk about this stuff without treating inceldom as simply a set of beliefs you just straightforwardly and wrongly choose to assent to. It’s an entire worldview whose affective components are crucial to its staying power.