The incel subreddit is filled with angry dudes who think their inability to convince any human females to have sex with them — their “INvoluntary CELibacy” — is some kind of human rights violation.
Many of these guys aren’t just mad that teen and twentysomething hotties aren’t leaping into bed with them; they’re mad in advance at any hypothetical “post-wall” women who would have sex with them. Because, you see, these bitter fellows imagine that all these women spent their prime hottie years having near-c0nstant sex with other dudes, thus using up all their sexual appeal, or something.
In other words, these guys think sex with any woman over 30 is like eating leftovers that have been quietly rotting away for a week in the fridge.
On the Incels subreddit today, a fellow calling himself jackville07 sets forth his version of this basic thesis:
I have so many questions. First off, why would any woman over thirty possibly want to have sex with a dude who sees her as the sexual equivalent of week-old lasagna sitting in the back of the fridge?
And second, are you aware that having sex with a woman over the age of thirty is not actually the sexual equivalent of eating week-old lasagna sitting in the back of the fridge?
Incel dudes: Here’s the thing. Not everyone starts having sex at a young age. Some don’t lose their virginity until they’re 30 or older — and this includes plenty of women. And very few people out there are having the constant sex you imagine everyone but you is having. Lots of people have dry spells — some of them years long. There are even some “Chads” out there who are, to use your term, “involuntary celibate.”
There’s nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to be angry about. It’s a part of life, not some plot engineered by the world’s women just to make you miserable.
Here’s the other thing: Incel dudes, as long as you have these attitudes, you are basically unfuckable. No woman — under thirty, over thirty, any age — should have to put up with a guy who hates them so much he’s furious that she’s ever had sex with anyone but him.
If you are able to purge yourself of these toxic ideas about women and sex, you might end up discovering that sex with women over thirty (or forty, or fifty, or OMG even older than that!) can actually be pretty damn awesome? If you get to the point of having sex on a relatively regular basis, enjoy the sex you are having, don’t sit around nursing your bitterness over hypothetical sex you didn’t have when you were younger.
One incel Redditor responded to jackville07 with this nonsense:
I’m sorry you were bullied, dude; no one deserves that. But as for the rest of your comment, well, fuck you. You didn’t “get laid at 18?” Big damn deal. Roughly a third of American males aged 18 and 19 are still virgins. If you spend the rest of your life bitter about the sex you weren’t having at age 18, no woman will ever want to fuck you, including the “chubbies” you’re now begging for sex.
Dudes, stop obsessing over the sex you’re not having. Stop reading the incel subreddit. Go to therapy. Your bitterness and hatred of women is rooted in self-hate; so are your feelings about older women and “chubbies.” Do your best to work through all of these issues. You will become a better person. You will become a happier person. You will become the sort of person women want to have sex with.
@Kat : science, sadly, isn’t able to create babe compliant enough for them. Apparently, there is something about “paradoxical set of requirement”, “test model still being seen as unruly despite litteraly following all order”, and stuff like that.
Also “not worth the effort”. Mostly that one, it seem.
@Ohlmann
Incels would really, really like to attract women effortlessly.
Similarly, I’d like to win the lottery without buying a ticket. It’s cruel to expect me to enjoy life if I can’t win the lottery!
Mark Plus
Me. In hindsight, my biggest regret is that I didn’t get therapy sooner. So much time wasted being frustrated and unhappy. Actually, so much time spent making myself unhappy and not understanding why.
Turns out, when you just stop sabotaging yourself, life gets a lot easier.
My girlfriend is 27 and i am 24. I had never had sex before her but she had and it’s totally irellivent! We have been together now for nearly 7 years. Maybe its as simple as respect for eachother that makes relationships last? What nonsense that too much sex somehow damages woman? I mean that would explain why these guys thing women have no loyalty. Why should you want to stay with someone who doesn’t respect you? Seams like the logical choice.
@Kat – Me too! It’s cruel and unfair to expect me to live without the million dollars I am owed. Let’s form an “inpoor” support group.
So then what’s the problem, Mark? Why so whiny and bitter? You’ve got your whole sexual life ahead of you. If anyone should be whining about being incel, it should be 30+ yo women.
And yet, you don’t hear anything of the sort. Which is a good indicator that this whole concept of “peak fuckability” happening at a biologically determined age is bullshit.
Peak fuckability is distinct from peak fertility, which happens later than you think for women, and is also a thing for men, too. There’s a reason sperm banks have an age limit for donors. Risk of autism and birth defects increases with the age of the father. I don’t buy the rumors about Barron Trump, but Trump isn’t exactly the picture of virility, what with the propecia use, orange complexion, junk-food diet, zero exercise other than golf, retreating to his bathrobe by 6 pm, and his lousy thin-skinned, weak personality. He’s the quintessential old man yelling (or tweeting) at clouds. If somehow he and Melania divorce in the next few years and he’s able to find a new wife or mistress, it will be in spite of his age, not because of it.
Take away the $$ and gold-plated toilets, and Trump would be just another incel loser who grades women numerically and views them as status-conferring objects. It’s telling that he has to “grab them by the pussy” and that he’s left a trail of assault victims throughout his life. You’d think women would be willingly throwing themselves at such a superior specimen, no?
I hope these young men grow up eventually. I’m pessimistic about it, though. I wonder if it’s due, at least in some part, to the huge amounts of video games and porn these guys consume. They’re immersed, from a very young age, in an electronic fantasy world designed to cater to them. Add to this a lack of real-life experience, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
Like another commenter above, I had no luck with the opposite sex until adulthood. I never thought it was anyone’s fault but my own. I figured I was too shy, skinny, pimply, and awkward to have a boyfriend. Shooting up a school in revenge against “society” never entered my mind.
Like another commenter, I would never want to be young again. Middle age, with all its disappointments, is far preferable to me.
I am extremely skeptikal of any explanation that start by “huge amount of videogame”. In history, the exact same argument was made about novels, television, theaters, and likely other things. And I am not exactly sure that the videogame at large are made to cater to them ; at best, they choose specific viedogames that they find appealing. But a lot of discussions with thoses guys convinced me that they use the good old rose-tinted glasse method to not see what they don’t want to see, both in videogames and in reality.
I think the root cause is that there is a lot of asholes among humans. The incel asshole variety is likely less problematic than witch burners, mob lynchers, and the like, but they are still dangerous.
@Ohlmann: You may be correct; it’s a broad statement I made. Also, like I said, I’m middle-aged. I haven’t been involved in youth culture for a long, long time.
This is a very interesting point. To further it, I feel that there’s an essay to be written about internet-socialisation-as-video-game, although I am definitely not the right person to write it.
@Dormousing_it
Hey, don’t blame the videogames and porn, I’ve consumed mountains of both and I’m nothing like these wastes of organs, except for the whole still being a virgin part. This is all about entitlement, without it you don’t turn out like them, you just accept your failures rather than blaming women.
It’s true that videogames do tend to portray women as sexual rewards you get in exchange for gifts or quests, in fact Jim Sterling made a great video about it, but that’s a pretty common staple in all forms of media. I can’t count how many movies or shows use women primarily as a prize that the hero wins in the end, and boys are absorbing this message their whole lives, so it’s no wonder many start to feel like they just deserve a young attractive woman solely by proxy of being a male.
However, if you have no sense of entitlement, that message slides right off you like a dead hagfish. I don’t know exactly why I don’t have that, maybe because all the self-esteem was beaten out of me long ago. Either way, I thank the All Father I didn’t end up like these bitter little disappointments.
Funnily enough we were just having a conversation about Incels and video games last week. If it’s ok I’ll just cut and paste:
ETA: ninja’d by dr thang
Internet as a way to be isolated from other opinion is however a phenomen that begin to be well documented. That’s the end of mass-media in that you much more easily get a media that please to your specific taste. The good side is that, to be honest, sites like this one are a lot easier to find now than anything similar in the 1970’s.
The horrible downside of that is that if you’re a proto-nazi, you will find sites and newsgroup ready to feed your hatred very easily.
That being said, I think the current rise of all sort of hatred is more a product of economic crisis and organized poverty than a product of the internet. The internet might have made it easier, but nazis (and all their predecessors) showed that when there is a hate, there is a way.
As much as misogyny in games is a problem (and oh God is it a problem), placing the blame for these ego-tripping sexist assholes at the feet of gaming misses a huge point: Games are the way they are because game companies are run by men who’ve been ego-tripping sexist assholes of the exact same kind since long before gaming was even a twinkle in a military oscilloscope’s eye.
The cause is cishet white male entitlement, not gaming. The Internet’s just shone a light on something that was always there.
@Dr. Thang: I realize it’s not ALL young men affected this way; not by a long shot. It may be entitlement. It may also be, a certain personality type is primed to be affected very adversely by certain kinds of media.
I had the little bit of self-esteem I possessed haraunged out of me:)
@Ohlmann: You’re right about movies, novels, etc; the same sort of things have been said about them. When I was a teenager, it was MTV. MTV was the big corrupter of American youth, said to destroy our attention spans. Well, I’ve consumed massive amounts of MTV, and I doubt it did me any harm.
@Alan Robertshaw: RE: That last paragraph: So with these incels, it’s circular reasoning in regards to women. Also, there’s no place for differing ideas to gain a toehold, or to even be considered.
@ kat
“Government gets girlfriends” is both an incel philosophy and the handle of a particularly notorious incel blogger (if you are going to look him up there aren’t enough trigger warnings in the universe).
The proposals vary from state sponsored prostitution through a sort of ‘sexual socialism’ (basically women’s rights being tied to willingness to have sex with incels) to outright sexual slavery.
They’re real charmers. One other thing I’ve noted in my delving into that murky world is a habit of capitalising ‘ER’ in phrases like “get hER off your back forevER”. That turns out to be an homage to ‘saint’ Elliot Rodgers; who’s a bit of a hero for a lot of them (although being Incels there’s also a subgroup that hates him because he had ‘acceptable’ physical characteristics and a car so technically he’s a ‘Chad’)
@Magpie:
Seriously. I’m crowding 50, and I have yet to buy an overpriced “anti-aging” anything. Because I don’t think every last wrinkle (including the ones I was born with) needs to be hidden or erased before I become A Worthwhile Person. Marketing, how does it work?
Maybe if these guys could pull their heads out of the TV set (or their arses, same diff), they might actually get somewhere.
Also, if our troll is still around, wondering what good therapy does: It worked for me, as a teenager. Among other things, by helping me to (slowly, gradually, eventually) see that how fuckable (or unfuckable) I was to others didn’t make no nevermind at all in the grand scheme of things. That everybody has to lead their own life, and that there is no textbook correct way of doing so. And that’s a lesson that’s still serving me well at almost 50. Evolution, how does it work?
Also, in regards to today’s video games, I’m an outsider looking in. It seems to me, they are much more “immersive” in nature than the old-school Pac-Man type of games kids used to play on huge machines in pizza joints and convenience stores.
I guess cis-male entitlement may be the definitive factor. It must be nice, believing the world revolves around you, and even more, the very foundations of civilization are reliant on this. I’m being only a little bit sarcastic, here.
@ dormouse_it
“Reasoning” isn’t really a word that has much place in inceldom. But any challenge to their world view is dismissed out of hand. About a third of posts on their reddit group for example are complaints about being given advice. If ‘normies’ express a counter view it’s because they’re trolling or they’ve been fooled by women. If women try to tell them about actual women it’s either a lie or self delusion (it’s a common theme that women don’t understand their own nature).
There’s also a bucket of crabs mentality. I’ve been looking at Incels from a radicalisation point of view. There’s quite a sad thread at the moment. A high school lad (yup high school) has actually managed to talk to a girl. It’s actually quite sweet, they’ve clearly had a mutually shy teenage conversation about a common interest and she’d like to hang out sometime. But he’s now being warned in no uncertain terms that AWALT and she’s obviously sucking off Chad behind his back and she’ll just exploit him for his ‘beta bux’ (ie just lead him on in exchange for him buying her stuff).
@Dormousing : it’s truly hard to me to say if they are more immersive. The uncanny valley have a role here at least for me ; I was guenuingly more involved in older game like Secret of Mana than on newer game like The Witcher 3, because Secret of Mana don’t try to be realistic and is really, really consistent in his art style, while The Witcher is at that awkward spot where small aberration put me out of immersion.
There’s also the fact that the younger someone is, the less sensitive he will be to a last generation videogame. “The arrival of a train” was guenuingly immersive for early XXth century guy, but nobody now would bat an eyelid at it, because there is enough television and stuff that we easily see the difference between that film and a real train. I am not fully sure of that, but I expect a youngster who love videogames to spot the difference between reality and a last generation game a lot more easily than someone who never was quite interested in them.
@Alan : I agree with the bucket of crab analogy. Part of what it work so well is that it put failure on the shoulder of a mysterious conspiracy. It’s a lot easier to swallow being a “loser” when it’s not your fault. And it’s a lot easier to cast itself as a loser than to try to improve
(I do empathize with the root cause of their radicalization because I do hate seeking a romantic partner ; I guess in different circumstance and birth, I would easily have been one of them. Which is a chilling though)
FTFY
Mark Plus
https://youtu.be/C-IvV8thrO4
Menopausal Magpie and everyone else.
:Hugs:
@All
I don’t think we should blame video games, porn, media for misogyny because how do we explain misogny before those even existed? Those things come from misogyny. Blame the people who make them and the people who eat that garbage up.
Mark Plus is posting to David’s Facebook too. His Facebook is public. He is exactly the Dunning/ Kruger racist turd you’d expect him to be.
Dormousingit,
Mark Plus looks to be in his 60’s. He is grown up. He’s just awful.
@Fruitloopsie
Ty for the fix. That is alot more appropriate.
@Lea
For him it must be nice to know that there aren’t groups dedicated to ruin your life at the slightest provocation and sign of weakness.
@ fruitloopsie
I don’t think it’s media that causes this, after all misogyny has always existed, rather that it provides a ‘model’ that these guys can use as an explanation and a justification. Of course companies know their markets and feed that demand. But that also goes towards explaining why they get so peeved when media deviates from the standard narratives, for example with female protagonists.
And yeah, the terrorism classification is the basis of my project and the reason I’m having to delve into that particular metaphorical swamp.
(I quite like real swamps, they’re fun)
Alan
I know that’s what I said we shouldn’t blame video games, porn OR the media, etc when misogyny has always existed since the beginning of time before any of these were even invented and the rest you said is what I mean. Sorry that I didn’t clarify.