Something I’ve always wondered is what kind of women were in the lives of incel men when they were young. Did they have a bad relationship with their mother? Did they lack sisters or other female family members? Or is their family situation irrelevant? Maybe some particular situation in their early years caused them to develop a complex around women?
Since I haven’t seen it mentioned…it might be the same attitude you displayed with the question OP. Immediately wondering which woman’s fault it is that a man is acting badly.
It’s the Freudian question. What every psychology treatment, let it be behavior, psychoanalysis, humanist… comes to: Can you talk about your childhood/parents? It’s not an invalid question, but not a responsible thing for an actual adult to do, make your parents totally responsible for your actions past adulthood.
An incel is someone who has been rejected by all women. They are undesirable and are not intelligent enough or wealthy enough to be attractive.
Usually this person is hateful with little or no emotional intelligence. They could be self absorbed or narcissistic. They blame everyone (mostly women) but themselves for all their faults and mistakes.
Classic examples from pop culture include:
Hal Stewart (Tighten) from Megamind
The Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera
Agent 47 from the Hitman series
Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants
Claude Frollo from the Hunchback of Notre Dame
Richard III from Shakespeare
Lord Farquaad from Shrek
Jacob from twilight
You wrote all of that but forgot to answer the question.
It’s not about upbringing; it is about personality.
Agent 47, I think he’s just asexual.
I hope you understand what happen when you hate yourself and you think everyone hates you and reject you?
Lack of personal accountability (“my baby is a perfect angel,” “he’s just a kid”)
Discrimination (racism/sexism/propensity to find scapegoat for issues)
Not teaching conflict resolution at all ages
Popularity of toxic masculine celebrities
Mental disorders not being treated/toxic behaviors not being called out
I’m not an incel, but I do think there are cultural problems among a large percentage women (and men). I’m bi, but woman often don’t like my less planned out take on life, but men don’t mind it so much.
I also think car based infrastructure and the lack of 3rd places is destroying social circles, contributing to inclism.
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There are zero cultural issues that create incels. The only ingredient is a toxic world-view.
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It’s always someone else’s fault.
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Oh the irony.
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If you look up studies on “incels” you’ll find most report that incels have an incredibly high rate of mental health disorders, mostly untreated and sometimes undiagnosed. Issues like depression, anxiety, and autism are very common. These mental health issues affect their ability to form social connections which can eventually lead to inceldom where they surround themselves with other incels and feed off each other. I read one study that called this “tendency for interpersonal victimhood (TIV)”.
Upbringing could certainly have an effect on people’s mental health, but not everyone with mental health issues is an incel. Becoming an incel is an extra step only some take and I don’t think anyone truly knows how it happens.
“tendency for interpersonal victimhood (TIV)
I found that paper. Its in interesting read, but it only seemed tangentially related to incel behavior. It seemed much more focused on something like…the arguments that “white supremacists” use.
Just a minor but important point: being neurodivergent is not a “mental health disorder.”
I do agree it plays a role in boys becoming incels, but it’s not in the same category as depression or anxiety disorders.
Edit for the replies I got: I strongly believe our society needs to stop looking at neurodivergent people as somehow “wrong” or “messed up.” Your brain is your brain just like your skin color is your skin color, and no should be discriminated against for either. In this case, it really is society that needs change, not the individual. It’s uncomfortable or even traumatic for the individual because of how other people react to them, not because of who they fundamentally are. Having to Face all the time, being forced into far too stimulating situations, having very few people understand your needs while at the same time foisting their expectations on you is exhausting. And it shouldn’t have to be this way.
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As someone neurodivergent I would say it either is a disorder, otherwise everyone normal has the disorder. It has also caused me a great deal of anxiety and depression from being different and whatever else. None of it led to incel tendencies in my case and I just felt like nobody liked me because I was different from them. I couldn’t get along with other divergent kids either. Sometime into my several years of incessant migraines and hating everything and wanting to die, I became able to talk and react to people in a way that generally didn’t make them react differently to me as they did to others. I think the migraines made me worse though.
A digital upbringing it seems. Self taught, doomscrolling with no one around who loves them enough to tell them they are slipping away into darkness.
Then oversimplification by people stereotypes and lack of socialization to realize the complexity of humans and human interactions. It’s so easy to consider that “all women are A” or that “some of the people are A and some are B” when, in fact, you have all sorts of people with different spectrums of beliefs and understandings that you can’t just box into a category. Then, when getting together with people with the same stereotyping and labeling standards, they get to slip away together and reinforce their beliefs
Internalized logical fallacies combined with perceived (or real) trauma along with a lack of critical thinking skills or self awareness required to understand that their thinking is illogical.
The brain is a dumb piece of meat that was shocking into awakening and it is scrambling to make sense of the world and its experiences. It doesn’t do a good job if left to its own devices and very often makes mistakes that if not rectified early on can become near impossible to unlearn due to cognitive dissonance.
These lines of thinking have existed for a very long time, becoming louder during the age of information, and all it takes is for someone not in a good headspace to read something that both reaffirms their sorrow as well as shift their personal responsibilities onto another entity. Our brains eat that shit up if not critically analyzed.
So when someone attempts to say that their perceived persecution is wrong or self imposed they become angry feeling invalidated on a personal level.
Well, I personally know five. Four are mormon. I think it has something to do with being raised to think you’re better than women.
if you had to state something, probably over-bearing, over-nurturing mothers. but i highly doubt anyone would say that is the sole factor. it’s a combination of many things. even just being small or less masculine than peers can contribute. heck, being a completely normal person who is just a late bloomer can do it.
Having your child only have the internet as a guide for how men should act. Or to only get their answers about women. It breeds paranoia. It takes every tragic story and repeats it causing a false sense of ubiquitous understanding that all women are evil. It was especially bad in the early 2000 with MRA brigading everything. Reddit especially was welcoming to beat women subs, subs about getting off on women who cry, raping and create awful backstories to somehow justify women were in general deserving of vitriol and abuse. They had stories that women were con artists coming up with ways to fool men/be vindictive/ toy with emotions so they deserved to be tormented. The Reddit ‘MO’ was that ‘this was free speech at its finest’. At one point I witnessed one story of one women who lied about getting raped and it was copy pasted as a statistic with men believing this was more than one woman and more than one experience.made up stories were everywhere. Not one person could give first hand experience. It was always a friend of an uncle or cousin and for whatever reason this was enough for them to take on as evidence it was pervasive.
I think these kinds of websites are getting a bit more healthier in that people are catching it and calling it out for what it is. That is not to say there are some deep recesses that a developing mind prone to believing everything could get sucked in.
So with this I would suggest if you do have a child (or even man) somewhere that you’re worried about and starts saying some really fucked up shit about woman you sit them down to do a gratitude list with them about all the wonderful women they know(and help them define what makes a great person - catch out poor definitions like trying to define women by their worth to men or attacking women’s sexuality). Remind them that humans are a complex mix of individuals and that not all a person does is all about them. Help that needle find the balance cuz it’s real easy to go ‘all things are bad’ real easy cuz the human mind tends to focus on the negative. It’s a good exercise to do about anyone and anything really. Catches out a lot of unfounded negative energy and keeps it in check.
I’ve never met any incels in the real world. I assume it’s because like many other synthetic groupings of individual traits, they’re a minority that has worked themselves into an echo chamber which has simply gotten loud enough to be noticed by others not within that group.
I find that actually going out and interacting with people in the real world, absolves most individuals of these kind of horrendous traits. In the real world, people can call you out for your bullshit and you can’t just close the browser tab and run away from it.
People call out your faulty behavior? What?
I knew a guy in real life who got into men’s rights and Men Going Their Own Way nonsense- basically, he had sex so he didn’t qualify for incel, but he held a lot of the same beliefs.
I was the only woman he seemed to have any respect for. He didn’t respect his mother or younger sister, felt they had taken advantage of his dad and were now taking advantage of him. The one girlfriend I know he had, was very manipulative and not a good girlfriend.
I pointed out all the issues with his thinking and his MRA, MGOTW sources multiple times. he’d come back around to being reasonable for a while, then wander back into the toxic wilds of the internet. eventually, I gave up; I can’t be the only voice of reason you bother to listen to.
It’s interesting that he did have a sister. I always thought that growing up with a sister would make it easier for a man to understand womens’ perspectives since they literally grew up together.
If the sister was bad to the man growing up, it’ll have the opposite effect
Nothing to do with upbringing.
I was borderline incel. Viewed positive female peers (family, etc.) as completely different from “tainted whores” or whatever.
Bad experiences, chronic isolation are what make an incel. Lonely men without supportive friend groups who turn to the Internet for their social needs. Rejection and dismissal from real world people, acceptance and empathy from the hive mind.
Loneliness does a lot more damage than a shitty upbringing.
I wonder how incels would change if they just had a group of friends they could trust.
Content consumption. A guy is lonely and goes to Google and types “how to talk to girl” or a variation of that, which is fine and normal mind you, and instead of the top search results being positive and genuinely helpful it’s the beginning of a rabbit hole that directly leads to this kind of woman hating BS. Couple that with terrible male role models in that guy’s life and there you have it.
I believe it is appearance, the sample size is like 2~3 tho. At least I myself is suffering heavily from this.
Ah no worries it’s not only appearance! Gotta believe in yourself
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I see, I did hear from multiple places (including from girls ofc) that appearance is the most important though.
Maybe I live in a place where appearance is nearly everything, or something.
I want to add to this that it’s also a self circulating thing too. It’s easy to start reading text that’s antiwomen, seeing videos about it, slowly further looking into more and more negative things. Some guys literally brain wash themself on this. That’s why some media worry me.
For example I recently watched a video that discussed the negatives of Captain Marvel as a movie. Not long after my videos started showing negatives of other shows and movies like velma, shehulk and snow white etc.
Then not long after that all my videos started showing anti women, and more just outright incel videos.
YouTube recommendations/ads are weird. I started watching the Atheist Experience again and the very first time I put an episode on all my ads became for Christian products or services.
Makes me wonder whether those with the top dollar gets to influence what we see, and slowly how we think. A couple vids here a few ads there that slowly appeal to things it already knows you like. Until it creates a new norm.
Yes, let’s blame the women again.
The better question would include the father of the incel or what kind of parents does the incel have?
Why not just take responsibility for who and what you are and I don’t know, just live your life? Get help and get over it. Women don’t owe you anything.
I’m more interested in how the incel would treat a woman if he ever found one.
Oh goody gumdrops I’m about to become very unpopular again. Maybe this time someone will help me change my POV if I am wrong instead of just getting angry and resorting to name calling.
Here goes: feminism left young men behind and as much as one might want to say “don’t blame women” the feminist movement has given power to women over the years and that power comes with responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is to collaboratively carve out a space for men as we strive for an egalitarian society.
You know that if you say what what I just said you’re blaming women again, while if you ask how men can take part in feminism you’re making women’s struggles all about men, again.
Can’t win.
How can we have an equitable society if one side is never to blame for anything and the other is ‘whining or attention’ when they ask to be included in the changes?
The simple fact is that feminism has been an incredible source for good but it has focused solely on women. That has been a mistake because as one side changes, the other too just reshape itself.
I’m middle aged and I know so many men who my age and even some younger who thrash about daily trying to make sense of society with no role models and no standards to aspire to. No wonder some become angry.
Imagine being the youngest in generations of men who have been raised according to macho ideals. Be the breadwinner, protect women and children. Hunt. Gather. Kill or be killed… and now act with kindness and empathy to a changing world. I’m not defending or apologising for incels but it is time for young boys and young men to be considered and included in feminism. I’m a dad to two girls and a feminist, and I don’t want my daughters partners to be a couple of ornery jackasses.
There. I said it.
BTW: this is one of the ideas being addressed on the brilliant Barbie movie. “Maybe every night didn’t have to be a girls night.”
Who the hell has been telling men to hunt, gather and kill or be killed? What society are you living in? And no, i do not have a responsibility to carve aout a space for men (between my legs perhaps?). What the fuck are you on about? If men so desparately need role models and someone to look up too that’s their problem. They could try just being good people but i guess that’s too confusing.
You’re part of the problem.
You want change without changing yourself.
It isn’t going to work and it will make you bitter and angry.
Like this post of yours right here.
Feminism isn’t just about women; it’s about everybody. You mention a macho upbringing - that’s one of the many things that feminism is trying to fight. Telling boys that they have to be “strong,” be the breadwinner, can’t have emotions - these things are actively harmful to the boys. Everyone needs feminism - it’s about letting everyone be anything.
You may have heard the term “toxic masculinity” at some point. If not, I recommend doing some reading on it.
I’m not sure how you missed that this is precisely the point I’m making?
Sorry if my post was not clear enough but yes I totally agree, your post is I guess a less confusing way of saying what intended to convey.
