By David Futrelle
In the wake of today’s school shooting in Santa Fe — which left ten dead and another ten wounded — the mood on Incels.me is unusually subdued. On the highly active forum for self-described “involuntary celibates,” school shooters and other mass murderers are celebrated as heroes, with Elliot Rodger, who killed six in Alta Vista, California in 2014 as an act of “retribution” against women for rejecting him, regarded as a veritable incel saint.
But nobody on Incels.me is hailing the Santa Fe shooting suspect, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, as the second coming of ER.
In part that’s because, less than a month after a horrific act of mass murder in Toronto by a self-desctibed incel brought their community more media attention than ever before, users and mods alike are worried that any excessive displays of enthusiasm might lead to their forum being shut down.
And in part that’s because a lot of the regulars on Incels.me aren’t convinced that Pagourtzis is ugly enough to be a true incel.
Oh sure, there are some who are celebrating Pagourtzis’ alleged gun rampage as an act of heroism in the war against “normies.”
“THE INCEL REBELLION HAS ALREADY BEGUN!” cried one commenter, quoting from the Facebook message posted by Alek Minassian shortly before, police say, he deliberately ran down pedestrians in downtown Toronto, killing ten.
“[L]et us pray for the victims and their families,” another commenter in the same thread wrote sarcastically. “Hopefully they will suffer immensely.”
“A nice surprise for my Friday,” wrote a commenter in another thread devoted to the shootings.
“Fucking based,” added another in the same thread. “I hope the normslime suffered as they drew their last breaths.”
“Very good news” agreed a third, “guy might not have looked traditionally incel but he did rack up a nice score.”
In yet another thread, a commenter took pleasure in imaging the teenage girls likely killed in the rampage. “Take that hypergamous sluts,” he declared.
But not everyone was quite ready to canonize Pagourtzis as the newest incel saint. For one thing, he’s not dead, a fact that led some on the board to mock him as a “pussy” too cowardly to end his rampage with a dignified suicide.
But the real sticking point for many on Incels.me was that, in their minds, Pagourtzis is simply too conventionally attractive to merit the incel moniker.
“He looks like a high tier normie,” noted one ambivalent commenter, ” but maybe he is a mentalcel.” (That is, someone whose romantic and sexual woes are allegedly caused by their mental problems rather than their looks.)
“This dude has chad looks,” complained another in the same thread. “Just look at his masculine frame, lose big forearms and big wrists and pretty face. Next to him I look like a piece of shit with my skinny fat, manlet body, ugly face, small forearms and wrists like twigs!”
“If I was that good looking I would have never heard of this site,” sniffed a third.
Still, not everyone on Incels.me is convinced that Pagourtzis is a “high tier normie,” much less one of those hated Chads.
While the alleged shooter isn’t ugly, one commenter noted, he’s also “not a Chad which means he may as well have been ugly. Women make no distinction between a 1/10 and a 5/10. You’re either hot or not.”
Others said they suspected he was a “manlet” — that is, too short to catch the eye of Chad-obsessed Stacies.
Still others detected what they saw as a fatal flaw in his facial structure that would forever disqualify him from female attention. “NEGATIVE CANTHAL TILT,” one commenter thundered. “1 flaw = ITS OVER”
What on earth is “negative canthal tilt,” you may wonder — at least if you’re not an incel or a plastic surgeon. It means that your eyes droop a little at the outer corners. NCT has become something of an obsession with incels trying to find flaws in their own appearance because they refuse to believe the real flaw is in their personality.
Trust me, fellas. The real problem isn’t your looks. It’s literally everything else about you — as your reaction to this tragedy makes very clear.
Pagourtzis is a coward because he’s not dead?
I guess that means that everyone who posts on incels.me is also a coward.
Of course, they’ll find a way to spin that cowardliness as a virtue. Or an antivirtue. They’re very cool antiheroes with very cool antivirtues — so why oh why won’t hot babes (8 or greater, please) jump their bones!
It’s a mystery.
Fucking assholes.
I have nothing more to say about that.
Katamount has already linked to this in one of the previous threads, but I think it bears repeating in this context: while I hate to give a certain Canadian psych prof even more attention than he’s already getting, he is enabling incel arguments, and his audience is much, much bigger than theirs.
From the recent Times piece:
It’s so easy to make fun of stuff like this:
And I just made fun of his fans when I posted that ridiculous comic yesterday. But he’s a megaphone for the kind of views covered on this blog for years. Couple his reach with the cult-like tendencies of some his fans, and I’m feeling apprehensive about what comes next.
(apologies for such a lengthy post).
And they call women vain.
Incels are the worst. I curse them to forever have to get up and pee each time they finally get comfortable in their beds.
I curse their screens to turn dim everytime they go to their hateful subreddits.
This is a great threat about Jordan Peterson’s creeptasticalness. Shut up. It’s a word.
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/997489897777827842
Hell, Elliot Rodger would have been too handsome to be an incel, if ugliness were actually a requirement. Put a decent person in that body and I would have had all the butterflies.
It’s what comes out of their mouths that defiles them.
Ugh. That word “mentalcel” brought back some bad memories. When I was a younger teen I came off as very strange due to my mental illness. No boy (or girl I guess, but I grew up in a homophobic environment and this was way before I acknowledged even to myself that I was bi) would touch me with a ten-feet pole. I could tell just by looking in the mirror that I was conventionally attractive looks-wise, but my strange talk and behaviour just scared people off. If someone had presented me with the incel forums and the term “mentalcel” back then, maybe I’d have sucked it up, despite being a woman…
Although this story doesn’t end with me being a mass murderer, of course.
So here’s the thing. I know an incel. former high school friend. The misogyny led to racism and Islamophobia. Incels are, at this point, just another flavor of the alt-right.
The basic foundation of conservatism is misogyny.
OMFG – I’ve just looked in the mirror and I have (horror) negative canthal tilt.
Clearly my whole life is a lie and I’ve not been happily married for nearly 32 years and in that time raised two amazing people who are here this weekend to celebrate a birthday with amazing fun and food.
r/incels – WAIT, I’m on my way…
I just keep reading “mentalcel” as “metalcel,” which makes me assume they are either cyborgs or Lars Ulrich.
Rating the looks of a mass shooter.
Now I’ve seen it all.
re the Peterson moron: what world does he live in that women only want to marry high-status men? Do intelligence, personality, humour, shared interests and, yes, looks not exist in his world?
Yeah in that interview with the New York Times someone linked to earlier Peterson talks about how half of all men “fails”, and I’m like, huh? It’s in the context of incels, but seriously, it’s not like half of all men find it impossible to get sex/dates! Which world does he live in? Maybe half of all men are single at any given moment, but that’s not the same as being hopelessly lonely and sexless.
I just googled for statistics, and when people reach middle age, the vast majority are or have been married.
I always read it as:
BONESTRUCTURE
@SFHC
Oh my god, that clip – I have the giggles now, damnit
Um … that curse is the nightly reality for post 50’s. 😛
I’m surprised about the whole ‘mentalcel’ thing. I thought they were in deep denial that personality had any relevance to the ability to find a partner.
I mean, if they accept that someone can be reasonably physically attractive, but undatable because of the way they relate to others, then they’re basically one small step away from figuring out why they aren’t having sex.
(To be clear, I’m not equating mental illness with having a shitty personality, the difference is hopefully obvious. I’m pointing out that this idea is very disruptive to the incel belief system.)
So, incels don’t consider this guy “ugly” enough to be an incel. And yet, he apparently is. They could take this as a learning opportunity. It could help them realize that looks aren’t the problem. Their horrid attitudes are. IF they were willing to learn anything. But if they were, they wouldn’t be incels.
@Makroth – what do you mean by ‘he apparently is’ [an incel]? Did I miss something?
@Mish:
Peterson:
OK, that actually makes slightly more sense than the “rescuing your father from the underworld” line. He’s thinking of Pinocchio and Geppetto. Still unsure what he’s trying to say with the analogy. Learn to be a real boy?
I’m completely baffled by the Incels aesthetic hierarchy. This guy looks like a completely standard high school student to me, no less modelesque or monstrous than any other photo they put up and decide upon. Why is this guy too handsome but not Minassian or Roger?And it’s even more bizarre when they talk about Stacies – they talk as if every high school is full of Stacies, but their descriptions of Stacie sound like Kim Kardashian but more porn influenced. Not many women let alone girls have the time or money for that kind of hyper groomed appearance, even if that’s the look they are aiming for. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that looks like this in my workplace or down my street.
“He’s thinking of Pinocchio and Geppetto.”
Ah! I was thinking of Jonah and the whale and it didn’t make any sense at all – I wondered if he’d finally started comparing himself to God. I’m an atheist myself but I’m firmly convinced a lot of alt-right atheists just can’t stomach the idea of someone greater than themselves, and the Christian ones just confuse themselves with Him.