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.
@Mogwitch: Yeah it’s super weird. I agree that this guy just looks completely average. Since tastes differ, some will probably think he’s cute, if it were all about the looks. Minassian had this monobrow which isn’t my cup of tea, but also something which is easy to fix if you have one and you’re bothered by it. Otherwise he just looked completely average too, probably some who’d think him handsome if it was all about looks.
And yeah second you on Stacies. Most girls or women don’t put in that much effort.
There is nothing wrong with this kid’s looks. On the cute side of normal, I’d say. Alek Minassian was the same.
As for Elliot Rodger – I don’t really want to have to give him this, but if he had had any kind of a decent personality he would have been super hot (at least, by my taste). He is definite proof that the reason incels can’t get laid is nothing to do with looks – if he had been in any way even slightly tolerable, he would have had absolutely no trouble finding a girl, and probably a girl of the type he wanted. Never having met him, I can’t say for sure – but I would imagine angry red flags of entitlement leaked out of his every pore to a level that even the most naïve college student knew to get away from him as fast as possible.
It is nothing, nothing to do with looks. It never is, and never was. Yes, if you aren’t great looking you will have more trouble attracting someone, but “more trouble” is not the same as “it’s impossible” – you have to compensate with personality. And people do it, and do it well. The whole of female Victorian London went mad over Byron and he had a visible disability (lame in one leg) to quote just one example of someone the incels would have just written off.
It’s so fucking gross how these unrepentant anal warts are gleefully condemning people for dying, but it’s extra gross that they’re imagining that the supposed sexual promiscuity of teenaged girls and then condemning them for it.
@Jo
Sorry. I misread the last sentence in the first paragraph of David’s post.
But otherwise, i think my point still stands. Incels’ attitudes, not looks, are the problem.
Don’t understand them. Don’t want to. Never will.
I don’t understand. The Toronto van attacker was also taken alive (although he did try his best to commit suicide-by-cop), and I think that the Parkland shooter was as well. The incels were happy to claim both of those mass murderers as one of their own.
I wonder if this is some kind of attempt at distancing themselves from mass murderers now that the imcels are finally starting to face the scrutiny they deserve. If so, I feel like “he’s not one of us because he didn’t kill himself after his murder spree!” isn’t the best way to convince outsiders that your movement isn’t chock-full of hateful dangerous assholes.
ALL the incel mass murderers so far have been “too hot to be incels”. It’s almost like personality matters as much or more so than looks! & sure, looks can get you in the door, but you need a decent personality if you actually want to stay. Some women put a lot of value on looks, while some women care a lot more about personality. We’re not a monolith. We all want different things.
I, for instance, wanted a queer soyboy beta manlet twink, with skinny wrists/forearms, & negative canthal tilt.
Down-tilted eyes just tend to look more gentle, & happy; like the crow’s feet you get from smiling all the time ? These are not hideous deformities. They’re just ordinary, average facial features.
@Mish:
RE: Jordan Peterson. Uuuuugghhhhh. It must be nice to be so impressed with your own importance. To suggest young men go on shooting rampages because they can’t get laid, and this is women’s fault – this is vile.
I do have a rhetorical question. If women were to be doled out to men like any other resource, and forced to have sex with the man they were assigned to – these men had better not expect a ‘porn star’ performance?
Every time I think they’ve reached rock bottom, they just keep on digging.
Hi everyone, has been awhile since I have commented. Pseudo-vacation over here! Not a proper really real vacation, mind you, but a bit of one. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks discovering that I’ve had a wheat allergy for years, and after avoiding anything with gluten has made me realize just how much of an impact it’s had. It’s like waking up from a dream almost. I’ve been foggy-minded and congested and tired for so long I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to not be.
Coming back to these stories is not very nice, though. School shootings are horrible, and there have been so many this year. And the responses are so f’n angering. It is my hope that the good people of Texas and the USA in general are able to get good, intelligent, compassionate people into office, starting in 2018 and continuing into 2020, so that they can actually legislate on this. That’s the only solution that’s going to have an effect here – legislation that makes clear that the second amendment doesn’t mean unlimited armaments for all, and that right wing extremist groups are the largest domestic threat to the US right now.
Like, Trump doesn’t even factor into that. It’s the whole rotten edifice of right-wing power. The right-wing democrats are just as soggy-rotten too, in my opinion, but there’s enough impetus behind the progressive wing to get some actual improvements out of them. Trump getting booted out would just be a nice little reward, it’s the legislation efforts of progressive legislators that is the real goal.
Hoping for you, American friends <3 Now's the time when you should be getting in contact with local campaigns for the 2018 elections, incidentally, if you're planning no helping out. Worth looking into if you have the time and energy for it.
Hugs, Scild. I’m glad you’re feeling better now. Sorry it took you so long to find out.
Welcome back, Scild.
#VoteBetoO’Rourke
I’m pretty sure it’s been at least a decade. Stupid immune system! Whose great idea was it to fill our bodies with microscopic killer attack bees, anyways?
I have heard a bit of Beto O’Rourke! I hear he’s an improvement and I hope he does well!
I just don’t understand this thing of expecting women to be someone’s sexual resource. We’re not things, we’re people.
And how would that even work?
Hi Scildfreja! Glad you got that sorted out and found out what’s been wrong with you. Sorry it took such a long time.
Freeze FBI!!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/17/fbi-investigating-1000-suspected-lone-wolf-militants-director-say
About time too. Thanks to the internet there will be no shortage of leads to go on.
From the article in The Guardian:
It’s good that the FBI is taking things seriously, not so great that the Gov’t is hindering rather than helping.
Unortunately, I get the cursed 404 page when I click on that link.
But without knowing what’s in it, I can state emphatically that this Administration is the most corrupt I’ve ever seen. I never thought I’d have to live through another, far worse Watergate.
Tried posting another link twice now, my post just disappears.
I found the problem though, add an ‘s’ to the end of the link!
Jesalin, thanks! *Skips off happily to read it*
*okay, I’m back*
Yeah, my initial comment still stands, having read it.
This should work
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/17/fbi-investigating-1000-suspected-lone-wolf-militants-director-says
@ Violet the Vile
Thanks for bringing up Byron. Visible disability, check. Titled aristocrat with an attitude about that disability, check.
So far, so incel.
If his portraits are to be believed, a ridiculously handsome man.
So far, not pulling out of the incel mire (Elliot Rodgers was no Elephant Man.)
But, as you pointed out, Byron overcame his difficulties and some pretty blatant character flaws (‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’) through talent, charm and charisma, or he wouldn’t have had fans lining up for his attention.
Nit – picking point : I believe Byron’s era was actually late Georgian/Regency.
I saw on Twitter that the shooter targeted his ex girlfriend but it was a screencap without a link to the source. Has anyone read this in a news article anywhere?
It’s almost like men who’ve never had a girlfriend, men who used to have a girlfriend, men who have a girlfriend and men who have a wife all commit violence and we can’t just fuck men to keep them from hurting us. Who’d have thunk it?
WWTH, all I can find are reports that he didn’t shoot at people he liked. No mention of an ex-girlfriend.
http://wtkr.com/2018/05/18/suspect-in-shooting-that-killed-10-at-texas-santa-fe-high-school-denied-bail/
I once had a relationship with someone who called himself byronic. He was emotionally manipulative, endlessly self-adsorbed, and had a real talent for turning anything and everything into an unfair attack on himself. Also very good at ensuring he was always at the centre of whatever was going on at the time.
Byron, as a mythic person, bothers me to no end. He’s the epitome of aggrieved male entitlement. A bundle of the worst traits humanity has to offer, combined with some worthy talent – so we allow him all of his excesses. He’s celebrated, because of those excesses. If he were just a good poet he’d be relatively unremarkable. No, society celebrates him because he’s abusive – no, sorry, he’s romantic and capricious and dark and moody and tormented.
Far as I’m concerned he can go walk into the sea. Though my opinions may have slightly perhaps been influenced by bad experiences. Maybe kinda.