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?
It’s a lack of positive male role models in a person’s life. If they see people calling women hateful evil sluts, they may assume any negative interaction with a woman is because she’s a hateful evil slut, and they may not look inward. Don’t have to look inward, in fact, because the answer is obvious - just a useless slut just like whatever podcaster has told them.
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.
There’s no real blanket statement for this. It will always be anecdotal evidence.
My anecdotal evidence is that incels I’ve met tend to be men who were always turned away by women for being weird in one way or another. This can be never bathing, weird anime obsessions, never holding a job because they perceive themselves as above it, etc. And because of this constant spurring of them and depression or anxiety they start to blame whatever they can. They see being in a relationship with a women as what would make them happy, but women don’t want them. So it must be the women’s fault. From there they just go further and further down the rabbit hole.
All anecdotal by the way and in no way is this a blanket every incel statement.
Also: There are people who still believe women to be property. I have family like this, who are sex offenders, that still justify their actions to this day.
Pretty much boils down to women having too much autonomy, at least to my sex offender family members.
I’m sure you can guess what side of the political isle they were raised on. lmao
It’s stuff like this that makes me think all girls should be pulled aside at an early age and taught no holds barred knife fighting and then given a very sharp knife to carry visibly at all times.
Hahahaha I don’t know about that, as much as I DO agree with it.
That same family I mentioned in my last comment are the same ones who say shit like, “I WISH someone would break into my house so I can SHOOT AND KILL THEM”
I can see a world where women fight back, men kill them in “self-defense” and that is upheld by the misogynistic legal system, and the rapist murderers go free.
But again, I do agree with your sentiment.
Besides, we all know the answer is to take all the rapists and all the murderers and put them all together on an island and all the murderers can be raped, and all the rapists can be murdered, until you only have either two rapists or you’re down to one raped murderer, but who cares about him?
That’s how you create a super murderapist
Yeah, we do have to much Judge Dredd syndrome, that’s for sure.
Stop spreading bizarre, dangerous ideas like this. Weapons should be carried concealed whenever possible.
Well, obviously they will have a second, shaper knife concealed as well.
Isn’t it mostly the appearance?
… Did you just ignore their entire paragraph where they included reasons these guys have been rejected?
They can be fugly on top of that
It can be, but I’ve met some decent looking guys who were incels. I think most I’ve seen tend to initially put off women because before full blown incel they already have a warped perception of women. Some I’ve seen are also just downright narcissistic. It can be a lot of different things.
I see, I thought appearance is the biggest factor. Maybe it’s just local thing around me.
I think incels are a group of sufficient size that you can just state relatively is that all of the above are likely to be true to some portion of them whether that be extremely negative experiences with women such as abuse from a parental figure, they mentally don’t connect well with the women they meet and thus are unable to form meaningful relationships or they just fell into it and are on the edge and not in the deep black pill stuff but identify with the word.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-08/ran_cn_incel_phenomenon_20210803_en.pdf presents three main ideas (on page 4) being
history of abuse/mental trauma, social skills deficit and/or lack of awareness/distorted boundaries.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/finding-a-new-home/202301/new-research-on-why-incels-hate-women?amp Whereas this one (looking for the extremist and violent incel subcategory of incels) basically hits upon every possible reason from abuse to indoctrination to just active toxic masculine.
Adding this link, though it doesn’t seek to answer the “why” as much as describe the “what”
I can’t copy/paste from that soutce on mobile, but it mentions many respondents to a questionnaire indicated they lived with their parents and had either depression, anxiety, or autism (prevalance in listed order).
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
I don’t think, that there’s a certain type of environment, but some combinations of environments, character traits, and maybe just events in life.
What I noticed is, that incels fundamentally lack the ability to see other people as people, but more as automatons, NPCs. You manipulate levers and dials in a certain way and get a predictable result. To me, that sounds a bit autistic. Most people who have that trait in one form or another (I’d include myself), learn that this is not actually the case and humans are in fact a bit more complex.
But if you don’t learn that and then end up in a life situation, where you are sexually “underserved” (which is very likely for autistic people, ask me how I know), but desperately want love, but also don’t understand, that you’re might be the problem, I guess there’s a chance, that you could become vulnerable to that mindset.
On the other hand, there’s the loudmouths of the movement, who I personally suspect to just be socially incompetent narcissists. They can’t fathom that someone doesn’t want them, so they’ll create a narrative, why everyone else is at fault.
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
I hope you understand what happen when you hate yourself and you think everyone hates you and reject you?
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 think boys and men have serious issues in our society that are not getting the attention they need. This along with changing social structures leaves some men behind. And they turn to the dark corners of the internet where other men just like them seem to care about them, and seem to have the same problems as them.
Boys and men are falling behind in schools and universities. Many colleges that have affirmative action are now having to use it to boost enrollment for men. Many of these rules were originally meant to increase numbers for women.
Women and girls have issues that society needs to help them with, and often times these issues get a lot more attention and are met with sympathy and understanding.
Whereas sometimes for men’s issues, the base reaction of society is to say stop crying and be a man. Men asking for help in and of itself is generally seen as not a manly thing to do.
This is an oversimplification of the issues, but just making fun of incels without trying to understand where they are coming from is probably not the best strategy to get them the help they need.
This in turn, leads them to start listening to men like Andrew Tate and other asshats.
The important part of the word incel is the “in”—their situation is involuntary. They don’t have the skills or ability to change without help.
Most do- they just think they’re entitled enough not to have to life a finger. It’s entirely voluntary for most of them.
You left a comment above saying that there are no cultural elements that contribute to people becoming incels. You need to have some more empathy for people, as long as they aren’t hurting others
I have zero empathy for people with self-inflicted conditions.
I have a friend who has slid into a lifestyle that is incel adjacent (he’s not quite fully rage filled against women yet), and I find that it is hard to determine what is voluntary and what isn’t. He is fully capable of getting a job or a girlfriend, but his worldview is so warped by depression and anxiety that he simply self sabotages any opportunity to have those things. He suffers greatly and blames himself a lot, but he is also the only thing that is ever standing in his way.
He doesn’t lift a finger to work unless forced, but observing him over the years has led me to believe that it is all a product of severe anxiety. There is no chance of failure if you never try, and it’s easier to act arrogant than it is to constantly reveal how much you actually hate and doubt yourself.
Sadly, there’s not much you can do for someone like that other than continue to be honest and hope it seeps in. Sometimes I feel like Brandon Novak waiting on Bam Margera to be ready for help, but I still have hope that he’ll see the light one day. Under all that negativity, he is still a worthwhile person.
I would just like to say, that society didn’t just start “caring more about women’s issues over men’s issues” overnight. To get society to give a shit about women at all has been a constant, centuries-long battle fought by various feminists.
It’s not the effect of society “caring more about women” necessarily that you’re seeing, it’s the direct impact of a loooooong battle for recognition. I think that men could benefit from the same thing, because there are a lot of problems that men also face because of the same patriarchy that women face. The be strong, don’t show emotion, being to close to another man is gay type of rhetoric is extremely harmful.
When done in a good-faith way that’s not a disguised attempt to roll-back women’s rights as some men’s rights discussions can sometimes be, I (a feminist woman) am a huge advocate for healing our boys and men. Obviously changing the way we parent boys will help, but it also takes communities of already-grown men themselves to come together to do that work on themselves, as with any self-improvement.
Very interesting. I checked your claim and you’re right https://hechingerreport.org/an-unnoticed-result-of-the-decline-of-men-in-college-its-harder-for-women-to-get-in/
What gets me is that the discourse around incels is forcibly centered on how they effect women, when it should be focussed on the societal problems that turned those men that way in the first place. But it’s not palettable to discuss the issue unless women are given the victimhood role.
It’s much like how every year funds raised for breast cancer research are an order of magnitude more than funds raised for prostate cancer research, even though more men die of it than women do of breast cancer. Both are worthy of funding, but they’re certainly not treated equally.
Men not getting the sex they feel entitled to is not a societal problem. It’s a male problem. Noone is entitled to sex and men need to learn that.
I don’t understand your point but prostitution is legal in some places.
The mens issue being talked about is involuntary celibacy and that is not feminists problem to solve. Nor should sex workers have to deal with misogynists.
Men’s issues and women’s issues are problems for society to solve together. Feminists can do whatever they do. Doesn’t change anything that society needs to work together to solve.
Okay, we’re going to continue not having sex with sexist entitled incels then. You’re not entitled to our bodies to “fix” this issue.
You do you I suppose.
Would just like to point out the men can also get breast cancer:
Yes, but the rate is only 1% of all breast cancera diagnosed.
Yes, that’s true. 1% is still a significant enough amount (accounting for how large the human is at present) that men benefit from the past breast cancer research as well.
I’m just pointing out that it isn’t a disease that only affects women. I dated a guy back when I was 14 or so, whose uncle got breast cancer. He was all paranoid that he had it, too, because he had lumps in his chest. In his case they turned out to be beniegn
I’d rather that men know there is a (small) risk, than ignore signs because they think that only women can die from it
1% is the typical birthcontrol pill failure rate, and I know of at least 2 babies born into the world while her mother was using bc pills
I’d rather that money is apportioned to finding cures for diseases based on how many people they kill, not by which gender it effects the most.
Agreed
I listened to an interview with a woman who did an in-depth study of the loose coalition of websites and social media personalities of which the incel movement is a part. She described it as “funnel shaped,” which is to say that they don’t start with the darkest, most unhinged language. They start by talking to young men who feel lonely and rejected, and they talk about how they shouldn’t feel bad about being men, how they deserve respect and status, and then it goes on from there down the rabbit hole into the really depraved stuff.
The reason this works is because a lot of young men don’t hear those initial encouraging words in a lot of other places. They hear a lot about toxic masculinity and the harm of the patriarchy, and they feel like their identities are being targeted, and they don’t have a lot of positive healthy male role models to turn to.
We need to have ways of talking to men, especially young men, about how they should feel good about themselves, how they should be proud of the good things they can do in the world, how they should be the best versions of themselves that they can be, and all of that in ways that don’t lead down that dark road to toxicity. It’s an incredibly wide ranging problem, and it’s not going to be easy to fix.
This ⬆️ 💯 great take.
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.
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.
“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.
What’s your definition of incel? Just involuntarily celibate, or also full of hate?
What’s your definition of MAGA, just make America great again, or also election denial?
I don’t think the phrase MAGA stands for makes sense. It could mean anything. Being involuntarily celibate has real, obvious, clear meaning.
Please just consider what things might mean in good faith.
OK, let me put it another way. I don’t think there’s a safe amount of incel writing to read and I think that the phrase “involuntary celibate” is loaded with resentment from the start.
I think it’s OK for any of us to be unhappy that we’re not in a sexual relationship, but I strongly believe that categorising onesself as having celibacy imposed is, at the outset, inventing a fictional collective will and conspiracy on the part of a large and nebulous group of people, who are individually and collectively not even slightly responsible for any individual’s or group’s happiness or sex life. As a self-label, it inexorably leads to blaming others.
It’s true that some teenaged girls can be powerfully cruel, dismissive, hurtful and nasty to boys who take an interest in them, and at those times, those girls are guilty of psychologically damaging the teenaged boys they have emotionally attacked, but they are still not in any way whatsoever responsible for anybody’s sex life nor in any way whatsoever for the lack thereof.
It’s also an oxymoron. The word celibate is only correctly used for someone who has chosen to abstain from sex for some reason (usually religious). It’s logically impossible to involuntarily abstain, because abstinence is a choice but definition. For example, if you are ineligible to vote or someone prevents you somehow from boring, you aren’t abstaining. You are only abstaining if you can vote but choose not to.
So, in summary, involuntary celibate is a phrase that deliberately twists meaning and twists morality, placing responsibility and blame on a group of people who are neither responsible or to blame.
You claim that involuntary celibate has a real, obvious and clear meaning, but I disagree with everything in that assertion. Involuntary abstinence is meaningless as a concept, lacks clarity of thought and obscures meaning. The actual real, but hidden and non-obvious meaning in the phrase is (erroneously and fictionally) that women are to blame for men’s lack of sex, so in fact the meaning of the phrase is far from obvious and real, as evidenced by your mistaken belief that it’s a neutral term. It’s a term born in hatred and designed to foster blame and hatred.
You might well believe that you’re using it innocently and I’m good faith, and if so, please realise that you’re very much at risk of being drawn into a hate group.
You are, I’m afraid, deluding yourself if you think that you’re one of the non-racist MAGA fans, just as you’re deluding yourself if you think you’re an incel who isn’t incorrectly blaming other people for your lack of sex or that you aren’t on the road to toxic misogyny with that way of thinking.
There are many things wrong with society, with gender relationships, and with dating expectations, but women and men’s absulote freedom to not have sex whenever, wherever and with whomever they feel isn’t one of them.
Bruh, compress your thoughts into a paragraph or two, or you’ve become the nerd emoji
Sorry to have overestimated your attention span.
Your summary is at least as long as the main - lol
I also had to learn to write things more compressed, because it was just hard to read.
I handled it, by trying to always get straight to the point. What i still struggle with, is how blunt i come across…
TL;DR.
Fair enough, yeah, you don’t want to be reading anything more complicated than a sentence or two, otherwise the might be a risk of developing understanding or perspective. Best avoided.
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.
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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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.
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 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.
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.
