By David Futrelle
On Reddit’s IncelTears — a subreddit devoted to mocking and critiquing the toxic incel subculture — someone claiming to be a former incel has posted an account of their escape from inceldom. It’s a throwaway account, but the story he tells seems pretty convincingly true to me.
“In the wake of the horrific events in Toronto,” he begins,
I wanted to share some of my experiences as a former incel, and how I eventually changed my behaviors to become a better person.
Being an incel is awful, it’s an awful predicament, with an unhelpful community to back it up. Often when people describe an incel, the general description is “Involunaty Celebate”, someone who can’t get girls, etc. This is the most glaring issue and the one bought up by the community but it isn’t the only issue in most cases.
When a guy can’t get a girl to save his life there’s usually some undelying social issue at play and that issue has an affect on that individuals entire social life, not just the intimate aspect. You don’t feel important, you don’t feel valued. This starts to play on your self esteem and is partially to explain for the very self-hate low IQ trodding nature of the community.
Unfortunately, the incel “community” only makes this self-hate worse.
The community’s biggest problem is that it does nothing to fix the problem and only goes to reinforce ones already held beliefs. So you’re someone who can’t get a girl, shunned from society (to various degrees) and you go online to find people like you, and when you get there you find false explanations for your problems and an echo chamber of your ideas.
You confide in this group and as a result, you start to inherit some of that group think and ideas. These ideas don’t help you in the real world but rather make things worse, it’s a downward spiral.
So what was it that led him to start questioning incel dogma — and eventually extract himself from this morass? As he explained in a followup comment, he literally got off of incel forums and into the real world, where he quickly found that most of what the incels say about men and women and dating and pretty much everything is just plain wrong.
One of the things I did was get out there, almost in a literal sense.
When I was an incel I never went out. I had never been in a bar, never been to a club, I didn’t know that life in the slightest. So when I went online it was very easy to believe the things you read about bars/clubs/women/chads/stacies/etc because I had no comparison in the real world to call bullshit on one way of the other. The first time I went out to a bar, 20 minutes in and getting a drink I saw a guy, probably 3 inches shorter and twice as round sitting in the VIP section with a bunch of hot girls nearby. Seeing that shattered by worldview because according to the incel community, that guy was doing something that was fucking impossible in their eyes.
I’m not sure that the VIP section of a nightclub is what I’d call a representative sample of reality, but it’s certainly the case that the easiest way to challenge many of the central myths of incel is to simply open your eyes to the evidence all around you in the real world, where you’ll find men of all sizes, shapes, heights, and ages happily paired off with women of all sizes, shapes, heights and ages. You have to be willfully blind to believe that women won’t date short men, or men with improperly angled eyebrows, or men with inappropriately sized wrists (and yes, these are real incel beliefs).
The former incel continues:
After that I kept going out and every time I went out there was always something different, not a single night was the same. Always different characters, different situations, different interactions. I started to see that there wasn’t just one pre-disposed type of person to get a particular girl and I learned that anything could happen, literally anything.
Yep.
I’ve been thrown out of a bar on to the street only to be invited to an afterparty 5 minutes later, I’ve gotten harshly rejected by a girl in front of her boyfriend only for her to run back to me before the bar closes and give me her number. I was in the corner of a bar talking to a girl telling her about where I was from before some drunk guy decided to roundhouse kick me because he thought I was lying about my nationality (that a was fun night). Countless upon countless situations where I’ve walked out of it going “what the fuck just happened”
I guess this is one possible escape from incel. But you don’t have to get into bar fights or get invited to any afterparties — or even set foot in a nightclub at all — to see that incels live inside a collective delusion that only vaguely resembles life on this planet.
Overall, it was just replacing the knowledge I had acquired from places like incel subreddits and forums with real-world experience. You can read PUA and incel forums all day long and get two totally different ideas of nightlife, or you can go out and get another idea entirely.
Yep. All it requires is that you just GET OUT of the incel subculture for a short time — whether you literally start going to nightclubs or simply free yourself from incel thinking long enough to see that what the incels are telling you is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Our former incel admits that this can be more difficult than it sounds.
When I finally came to my senses it involved me throwing out all of my previously held beliefs and ideologies. In theory, it sounds easy but if you’re a Democrat or Republican, imagine making the intellectual leap from one side to the other, it’s like doing that. Here you’ve been told to despise women, despite attractive guys that get those women, despise pop-culture and the things around it, now you have take all that and conclude that it was all wrong and you need to listen to the other side. And all the while you are trying to do this the community that you had around you is pointing to reasons why you shouldn’t make that ideological leap.
Nonetheless, it is possible. This guy did it. Others have done it.
The former incel ends his post with some words for those still caught up in the incel cult:
From this I want to leave a bit of advice for Incels that might read this. It can be hard to embrace advice from a side of society that has ostrizied you. But at the of the day what side do you want ot be on. Give whatever excuse you want but at the end of the day you know where you want to be. My journey from that community took years of standing the corner at parties, getting rejected by girls, getting into fights, it was painful. But from my experience, the pain is worth it.
I’d be curious to hear more stories from former incels who got out. If you’re someone who was once (but no more) under the sway of incel ideas — whether you were a regular on some incel forum or just someone who found themselves being drawn in by their rhetoric, please drop me a note (dfutrelle at gmail) or post your story in the comments below. Tell us what drew you to incel in the first place, how you got pulled in, and how and why you ultimately rejected that way of life.
Good on him for getting out.
I wanted to write a positive and charitable answer, saying that at least he made the jump out of the swamp and into the world of “normalcy”. But then I went on, pondering about what “Incel” actually is (IE: The self-accepted excess of the failure end of toxic masculinity) and… god, you’re right… -_-
Well, at least he’s not cheering when women get killed anymore
@WWTH
Baby steps. He still sounds young. If he’s spent ages in the incel subculture, it wouldn’t surprise me if he has a stopover in toxic masculinity on the way out. I find that once you have started self-discovery and self-analysis it’s actually quite difficult to stop it; I would hope that he’s going to see through toxic masculinity as well, which might well happen if he forms an actual relationship with a woman he genuinely likes.
To the OP: congratulations, it’s incredibly hard to start out on a new path when everyone around you is stuck in the old one. Like WWTH pointed out, you still have some work to do….but a lot of people never bother doing any of it. Some of the people who were your friends in your former community will remain sunk in hatred and self pity, blaming others for problems of their own making, for the rest of their lives. And – even if they never do any damage to anyone else – that’s really very sad. A waste of a life where they could have done anything.
Alan: your view is very American, in the sense of locking people up and throwing away the key.
Other counties have far lower crime rates by helping criminals get out of their life of crime. Rehabilitation (a formerly American idea) works.
I’m reasonably certain that rehabilitating former incels and other extremists is going to be required in any society that has any hope of reducing their threat.
Intellectual leap from Repub to Democrat? Not impossible. I did the Canadian equivalent. Came down to the same thing: Getting out of my small, racist, queerphobic, and sexist as fuck town and seeing the real world. Meeting actual black people and realizing they’re people like me (… seems fucking obvious but when you’re someone who literally never met a black person before age 18, it’s pretty easy to believe racist propaganda if that’s all you see). Likewise with FN people and other PoC. Seeing women do shit other than hospitality, nursing, teaching, or SAHM and be good at it. Meeting other queer people and realizing they’re genuinely nice people and I don’t have to hate myself because I’m not inherently a predatory because I’m not straight. And so on.
I think I was able to do it because I’ve always been the adventurous sort – I’ll do anything at least once even if it scares the hell out of me (and the far-right culture I grew up in was all about scaring the hell out of you). So when I got out of the town for uni, I wanted to try all of the things. When I tried all of the things, I wound up meeting all sorts of people I never would have otherwise. When I met actual people, my preconceived notions wound up running into the wall of reality at 90mph and smashing to little pieces.
(Hope that blockquote works)
Alan: All incels probably not. Some, perhaps:
Those who just started to get in there have a better chance.
It is not that the victims have to help but actually help (that should come from former incels) is not a bad idea. It works for groups like Exit in Germany.
And yes some of this thinks like the guy is still quite a jerk, but not beeing that dangerous anymore is a good think.
The Incel community reminds me so much of the pro-ana communities I used to frequent when I was young, except with hate thrown in. The young women in those communities were all very isolated, feeling worthless and unloved, and we had black-and-white thinking, just like incels. Most of us were abused or neglected by our families and had no friends at school. So we went into these communities for mutual support and obsessed over the idea that we would be valued and loved if only we were thin enough. I literally believed that no guy would think anything of me if he knew of any single woman who was thinner than me.
Incels seem to think very similarly, except they throw in hate. That’s the part I don’t understand. In pro-ana, we all thought “No one loves me, no one wants to be friends with me, therefore I’m worthless.” The incels go the other way and think “No one loves me, no one wants to be friends with me, therefore women are worthless.”
I don’t understand why. I relate so much to incels’ problems, but I don’t understand how it turned into hate.
@Julia
You can’t relate because you’re a decent human being.
It’s not: “No one loves me, no one wants to be friends with me, therefore I’m worthless.” for incels.
It’s: “No one loves me, no one wants to be friends with me, therefore they think I’m worthless. Fuck them all.”
This is by the way another think that is for me different to understand leap from Republican to Democratic, we have a lot of parties, chancing from one to the other is normal (perhaps a bit more remarkable when prominent partymembers do it.
If it is only regonal voting I can even vote for candidates of diferent partys.
@Shadowplay
But I keep seeing people like this Redditor talking like the hate is an inevitable result of the isolation and the echo chamber of obsessive black-and-white thinking. But if you look at pro-ana communities, you see young women who are just as disaffected as incels, who have come up with equally ridiculous ideologies to explain their problems. Good grief, we thought that all a man wants is to date the thinnest woman he can possibly find, and that all our problems would be fixed if we were thin enough.
So whatever makes incels the way they are, it definitely is not solely the isolation and the echo chamber of obsessive black-and-white thinking. If that was the case, the pro-ana women would be doing mass shootings too. There is something else.
Toxic masculinity?
@Julia
To them (and only them – I’m not doing apologetics here) it is the inevitable result.
Anorexics blame themselves, right? It’s their fault they’re not thin enough?
Incels don’t blame themselves in the slightest – they blame anything and everything but themselves.
So the people in the proana forums turn their hate inwards on themselves, and commit violence on themselves. Incels turn it outwards on the world and commit violence on the world.
And a minor editing victory! Saw the spelling mistake before the timer ran out for once! 😛
What I find interesting and intriguing in the OP, or maybe I should say odd and troubling, is the emphasis put on going to bars and nightclubs in order to socialize. Now this is just my personal experience, but I find bars to be full of annoying drunk people and nightclubs just plain intolerable due to the loud music. Off course, this might be due to the fact that as I have a family history of alcoholism on both sides of the family (both of my grandfathers drank themselves to death), I haven’t touched alcohol for a while now, and haven’t drank more than a glass of wine in total since 2001. Then again, I haven’t been in any kind of romantic relationship since November 2004, so I’m probably not the best person to judge… ô.Ô
OT
I wrote a few weeks ago that I had applied for a job in my chosen field, namely translation. Well, I didn’t get it, although I did make it to the final stage of picking applicants. I’m still unemployed and on the state pension, which is better than things might otherwise be, but it would have been nice to have the sort of work that I went to university for.
/OT
Both incel and pro-ana are deeply rooted in misogyny, which is where I think the difference itself comes from. Pro-ana women aren’t much less violent, but they turn that violence on themselves and other women, which is kinda the definition of internalised misogyny, and they do it in a somewhat more subtle way. So mostly they’re pretty much the same, in that they’re both misogynistic and violent movements that actually harm women. I think the difference is only in style, not substance.
I think part of the reason these guys don’t see the reality of women is that they are fixated on a very few women, and the rest don’t count.
If a woman isn’t under 30 and hot, she is invisible, and therefore doesn’t exist.
Which is also somewhat true of the MGTOWs, who don’t seem to realize that women older than 30 actually date and marry, and that there are men who are actually interested in dating and marrying them.
It’s all SMV this and SMV that, but people aren’t commodities and attraction isn’t as easily quantifiable as they think it is.
Basically, seems like incels are trying to apply a 10-point SMV rating scale to a population consisting of just Stacey and Becky.
Pseudonym:
The radical ones are there anyway, though maybe you mean they’d get even worse without regular feedback from moderate incels?
Then again, I suspect if anyone is getting out of incel community, it’s generally lurkers who aren’t much committed and only rarely comment. Their departure wouldn’t change the community dynamics much.
Let’s not waste our empathy on people who want us dead or enslaved. It’s not sad for these little balls of hate. They have a choice in this. They made this decision. It’s sad for all the women in their lives. Their coworkers, their family, any women tgey encounter online. That’s who this is sad for. The women aren’t the ones choosing the negative social interactions. It’s literally impossible to be filled with that much hate and not deal some amount of damage to the women around them.
Having been that person who has gone from Republican to Democrat and now even further left, I can understand what a life altering thing it can be to change your deeply held beliefs.
Good on this guy for getting out. It’s not easy to get out of a toxic “bucket of crabs” community once you’re inside it (especially when you start out inside it, but that’s another story).
Went from “murderous rape terrorist” to “garden variety misogynist.” Well, I guess that’s a step in the right direction. No sarcasm there, but I don’t want to get too excited about it, for basically the same reason as WWTH. His viewpoint is still pretty much all self-centred. Doesn’t consider the agency or desires of other people he’s involved in. This said we don’t know a whole lot of the situation he’s in. Maybe he didn’t know that the woman he was talking to had a boyfriend right beside her, after all?
I dunno, I’m probably being overly generous with that. I hope the guy keeps walking in the direction he started, ’cause there’s a long way to go yet.
Also, hello to all the people I don’t know in this thread!
After a night’s sleep, I think this is a big part of why I’m more skeptical than others about this.
You age out of the club and bar scene. Especially if you’re not naturally a social butterfly. There’s nothing to stop this guy from out to party, even on the rare chance that he still actually wants and has the energy to. But, 22 year old women don’t give their numbers or go home with that one weird older guy who’s clubbing like he thinks he’s a twentysomething. He’s not going to get spontaneous invites to after parties. Look at how Roosh got even more hateful and bitter than he already was when he aged out of the club scene. That’s when he remade himself as an alt-righter. If this guy doesn’t have something positive in his life other than whatever validation he’s getting from partying, he’s going to fall right back into the manosphere or maybe the alt-right.
I don’t want to fall into the trap that so much of the rest of the media is. Thinking that the only thing wrong with incels is that they’re lonely. It’s a hate group. Finding temporary validation with drinking and clubbing and finally getting laid is not enough to reform him.
Sorry to be the Debbie Downer. Maybe if the guy who wrote these comments came here and explained more, we’d find out he’d adjusted his attitudes towards women I’d feel better. Maybe he’s put in some hard work on himself internally and just didn’t talk about it. But realizing you can still get laid even if you aren’t ideally Chadlike isn’t it. As we’ve noted here in other threads about incel, men in relationships abuse their partners all the time. Misogyny is not caused by loneliness and sexual frustration. Don’t get me wrong, he’s more likely to change away from incel forums that in them. I’m just not giving out cookies because some guy logged off the internet and went to some bars.
@kupo
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a big sad for the poor misunderstood incels here. Certainly not at the expense of their victims.
I don’t feel sorry for them; I feel sad about them. There’s a difference.
They are so toxic and so unable to see it that it frustrates me enormously. It’s a waste of “being alive”. Even people who have been horribly hurt and abused can still find joy in life, can still think things are beautiful, but trying to describe “love” to some of the people I’ve seen posts about on here is like trying to describe “red” to someone colourblind, except colourblind isn’t a choice. That is the definition of “sad”. It’s a sad existence.
It still doesn’t mean I feel sorry for them though.
@Violet
Word.
WWTH, the OP might still be young enough for that scene. Could have fallen in with the Incel crowd when he was, like, 16; bailed out of it at 20 or 21 as part of a general going-to-college or something.
Doesn’t change my opinion on it, but I don’t think there’s a reason to think it’s a made-up story. It sounds like a believable set of events at least.
I’m with Scildfreja and wwth I’m a bit skeptical of this person’s veracity. Even if the story is true, going from online incel mysoginy to what amounts to PUA? Not exactly the kinda bravery that gets me teary.
Off(ish)-topic, my f’in spel-czech keeps changing “incel” to “uncle”… 🙁