Incels Are Often Not Who You Might Think
Do you still want to heavily invest in feeling sorry for them?
There seems to be this idea out there (particularly amongst men) that incels are just poor lonely guys who can’t get a date. They are otherwise normal men who feel perfectly understandable pangs of loneliness and isolation that someone who is socially awkward might feel, and we really ought to be, as a culture, a lot more empathic towards them. I’ve seen essay after essay to this effect recently, all written by men.
What most people don’t seem to grasp is that although this may apply to some men, it’s far from typical. Many incels are perfectly normal-seeming guys who have an abnormal sense of both entitlement and inferiority. Their desire for women’s attention is often much less about love (or even sex) and more about what they feel they are owed by society so that they can compete with other men. He wants to have the currency (aka objects) that will allow him to compete in male hierarchies.
For the most part, incels don’t truly view women as people, and they aren’t looking to have meaningful reciprocal relationships. They want the “goods” that society has promised them as men, and they are upset at being shortchanged on that.
It’s also a mistake to accede too readily to an incel’s self-reports about their lowly status in comparison with other men. With respect to male beauty standards, for example, a recent article on incels in New York magazine revealed photographs of perfectly ordinary-looking young men — some of them even handsome. They nonetheless hankered for different jaw lines, some going so far as to invest in exorbitantly expensive plastic surgeries, such as cheek implants and facial reshaping, to make them (in their own view) look more masculine.
Manne, Kate. Entitled (p. 19). Crown. Kindle Edition.
Elliot Rodger, a murderous incel who still is often invoked and inspires others in the incel community — including a string of copycat murder sprees — never even approached a woman or tried to get a date. Apparently, the hot blonde sorority girls that he desired were supposed to just drop in his lap, and when they didn’t, he resolved to kill them. He was a decent-looking guy who probably could have had a girlfriend if that was what he really wanted. But I don’t think that he wanted someone “in his league” — he felt that he was owed the most beautiful and socially desirable women on his college campus, and when they, not surprisingly, didn’t even know he existed, decided to kill them.
Incels seem to want women to soothe their inferiority complexes even more than they want them to soothe their libidos. This is born out by the fact that most incels are irate at the notion that they could just hire escorts. Access to affection and sex is much less important than the belief that they are entitled to have women give that to them on their terms. They want women less than they want the societal cache that would give to them.
Andrew Tate has said that for him, women are mostly an impersonal way to signal dominance to other men. “Females are the ultimate status symbol. People think I am running around with these hoes because I like sex. That’s nothing to do with the reason why I’m running around with these bitches. I got these bitches so everyone knows who the don is.” It’s this same deeply misogynistic belief that drives most incels.
Many incels share traits in common with abusive men — a sense of entitlement to affection and admiration that if not forthcoming in the way that they expect tends to lead to violence and dehumanization of women. Getting a girlfriend isn’t actually the solution to their problems because there’s an underlying sense of entitlement that they feel should be violently enforced.
Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project estimates that over 100 people have been murdered by incels in the past 10 years — most of them women. Guys like Rodgers, Scott Paul Beierle, Chris Harper-Mercer, and Alex Minassian are recognized as murderous incels, but many other mass shooters have also held extreme anti-female views that weren’t necessarily always accounted for. There’s also the racial angle.
Incels are often virulent racists. This is not to say that all incels are white; indeed, there are enough nonwhite incels to have given the racist terms “curry-cels” and “rice-cels” currency.13 But incels who are not white typically subscribe to white supremacist ideology. Elliot Rodger, for example, was half Chinese and full of racist self-hatred, as his writings made apparent. He bemoaned his lack of whiteness, longing to be blond and Caucasian:
Manne, Kate. Entitled (p. 21). Crown. Kindle Edition.
Not only did Elliot Rodger kill his two Asian roommates and a guest of theirs before embarking on his murder spree on the campus, but he also railed in his writings against a Black friend of theirs named Chance who engendered his hatred by telling them that he had lost his virginity to a white girl at the age of 13.
How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more. I tried not to believe his foul words, but they were already said, and it was hard to erase from my mind. If this is actually true, if this ugly black filth was able to have sex with a blonde white girl at the age of thirteen while I’ve had to suffer virginity all my life, then this just proves how ridiculous the female gender is. They would give themselves to this filthy scum, but they reject ME? The injustice! (source)
The fact that they hadn’t actually rejected him because he’d never even approached any women seems lost on Rodgers. Incels are quite often obsessed with social hierarchies and it’s enraging to them when those they deem to be even lower than they seem to have relationship success. It’s way less about not having love than it is about not having the “goods” aka women that they feel are owed to them.
In fact, the term itself is illustrative of this. This guy isn’t just dateless or desperate. He’s not someone who has tried and failed. He’s a man for whom celibacy has been imposed upon him from the outside — it’s (supposedly) something that has been done to him that he has no control over. Never mind the fact that the term was actually originally coined by a woman. Never mind the fact that women are routinely held culpable for things like their own rapes and pay inequity. These guys apparently bear no responsibility for learning how to be dateable. Women just owe them that, including approaching them to initiate contact.
The sad truth is that, like many oppressors, incels perceive themselves as being the vulnerable ones. They feel like the true victims, even as they lash out violently against others. And they feel they are in the right, even as they commit the most deplorable acts of wrongdoing. All the more reason, then, that we should be skeptical about incels’ self-reports about occupying a low rung, relative to other men, on an unjust hierarchy of attractiveness. More likely, they are looking for an unjust hierarchy to locate themselves on, thereby vindicating their preexisting feelings of inferiority and aggrieved resentment. (source)
The fact that hot blonde sorority girls don’t often date “regular” guys like Elliot Rodger is a manifestation of patriarchal dominance hierarchy norms. So-called “alpha” boys tend to date “alpha girls” in this artificial social hierarchy. But rather than railing against the system itself, Rodger was inclined to just blame the women — something that is all too common in incel ideology — because he has a sense of entitlement to them.
Feminist commentators were quick to point out what should have been obvious: that no woman was obligated to have sex with Rodger; that his sense of sexual entitlement was a case-study in patriarchal ideology; that his actions were a predictable if extreme response to the thwarting of that entitlement. They could have added that feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy, may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel — as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy — inadequate. His manifesto reveals that it was overwhelmingly boys, not girls, who bullied him: who pushed him into lockers, called him a loser, made fun of him for his virginity. But it was the girls who deprived him of sex, and the girls, therefore, who had to be destroyed. (source)
A good bit of the time, the women that incels are bemoaning being rejected by don’t even know that they are a part of the equation, in that they have never actually ever been approached or asked out. The assumption that they would say no is foisted upon them, without it ever having to play out in actuality. Again, the incel obsession with social hierarchies is mostly taking place within their own minds, and the women who are just going about their business have no idea these guys were even interested in them until they start shooting at them or vilifying them online.
A general ethical mandate says that when someone is in pain, we ought to try to soothe and assuage that pain if we can, all else being equal. Even if we aren’t in a position to help, we should at least express our sympathies. And incels are clearly often in pain (though that pain may at times be overstated). But when someone is in pain precisely because he has an overblown sense of entitlement to the soothing ministrations of others, which have not been forthcoming, stepping in to assuage his pain becomes an ethically fraught enterprise. Even expressing our sympathies runs the risk of feeding into his false, dangerous sense that other people — especially girls and women — exist to pander to the incel’s needs and to gratify his ego.
Manne, Kate. Entitled (p. 29). Crown. Kindle Edition.
This is my objection to anything more than passing human decency as far as empathy for incels. Women are expected to bear responsibility for themselves, even when the things that happen to them are objectively beyond their control. Most of these guys don’t even really want true loving partnerships — they feel entitled to women as markers of status. They care more about where they fit into traditional patriarchal hierarchies, which often have problematic racial overtones than they do about actual relationships with women. And yet, we’re supposed to feel bad for them, because they are lonely?
Meanwhile, there is no groundswell of support for lonely women. A woman coined the term incel, but it’s still a common belief, at least amongst men, that women can always find a good partner, no matter what. I’d like to ask Yael Wolfe, Shani Silver, and Carlyn Beccia about that because they are all beautiful, smart, accomplished women who haven’t always had great luck in that department and have written about it often. To be clear, I’m not equating these women with incels. I’m simply noting that they are a concrete example of how women often cannot just readily and easily find a great partner — as is so often purported. I think that dating is hard for everyone, and pretending that it’s actually easy for women is a misogynistic narrative that needs to stop.
I get that humans are a highly social species and that modern life has artificially introduced a lot of loneliness. I wish for everyone to find someone to truly love and care about them. But for the most part, incels are not just lonely guys, they are angry, entitled, men deeply bought into the patriarchal hierarchy who are upset that this hasn’t worked out too well for them. I believe that every human deserves basic empathy, but also that those who feel that is owed to them while they continue to cultivate anti-social beliefs deserve the barest minimum.
From my perspective, spending a lot of time talking about the poor male incels without also noting that a lot of women are alone and not able to find suitable partners is tone-deaf. It also completely fails to recognize the incel movement as an entitled and often dangerous one — something that more and more state and federal governments are starting to clue into and the concern is growing.
Analysis of the incel movement found that online references to inflicting violence and extremely degrading language on dedicated incel forums are running eight times higher than in 2016, when researchers first began tracking misogynist content on the internet. (source)
Women do not owe men care, love, sex, or anything else. Men who believe that they do, particularly when it has little to do with women as human beings, and more as social capital in a patriarchal hierarchy, need to get a grip. Men who feel inordinate sympathy for them need to understand that they are upholding misogynistic structures and are not just “feeling bad for a lonely guy.”
I’d love to see a more socially connected, empathetic culture that benefits us all. At the same time, I have no patience for those who feel entitled to anything, and who simply want to climb an artificial ladder of oppressive hierarchy. Incels are often reasonable-looking men who could have put in the work to improve their social skills and confront their own internalized patriarchal hierarchy. Instead, they choose to hate, dehumanize and sometimes kill women as scapegoats.
They do not get a pass from me, and neither do the men who support them. Not long ago a man called me a bigot for saying that. If you honestly think that’s what a bigot is, you are swimming in privilege. We should all care about loneliness; we should none of us support the incel interpretation of that.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2023
Edit: For those who think this essay is a mischaracterization of incels:
“According to a new study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), these incels are only getting more dangerous.
The CCDH’s Quant Lab analyzed 1 million posts on one of the most popular incel forums and found that the group has become increasingly radicalized over the past year and a half. CCDH Founder and CEO Imran Ahmed told the Washington Post that the forum is part of a “novel, new violent extremist movement born in the internet age” with a “cogent ideology” intent on harming women and girls. The report found that there’s been a notable spike in conversations around pedophilia, especially with prepubescent girls, and mass killings. The report also found that members mention the word “kill” approximately every 37 minutes and the word “rape” every 29 minutes. The forum is visited by roughly 2.6 million people a month.”
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