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By David Futrelle
Sullen teenagers have been yelling “I didn’t ask to be born” at their parents for, well, probably for millennia now. But leave it to the “involuntary celibates” of Incels.me to come up with a new twist on this ancient theme. In a recent post on the Incel,me forums — highlighted by the excellent Just Incel Things Twitter account — one bitter young man made this dramatic announcement:
Setting aside the fact that genetics is a complicated thing — conventionally attractive parents can have ugly kids and vice versa — one has to wonder how exactly Mr. Wizardcel managed to apportion the blame for his alleged bad looks between his parents — each of whom contributed equally to his genetic makeup.
Is his mother notably uglier than his dad, or does he just think she’s somehow more responsible for his looks because he lived in her womb? Or maybe his father is the ugly one — and Mr. Wizardcel blames her for marrying him? (Men’s Rights Activists and other reactionaries have made similar arguments blaming the mothers of violent men for existence of male violence in the world.) These guys are ingenious at figuring out ways to blame women for things over which they have no control.
So how did other incels react to Wizardcel’s announcement? Several called him out for taking out his frustrations with life on his mother and her genes. But others agreed with him wholeheartedly — and some went on to suggest that his existence was even more meaningless than he already assumed.
“There is no meaning of an incels existence,” wrote someone called Justshavebruh, because life is defined by “the ability to procreate and we’re not able to. We are not even alive per definition.”
Someone called Platypus took this weird evo-psych “argument” and ran with it, arguing that
for a biological being to fully express its life, it must make full use of its entire array of biological features. The less features you use, the closer to death you are. It’s self-evident looking at how old people become less and less physically able, until they die.
Not being able to procreate, is a deathlike existence.
Justshavebruh responded by declaring that
A virus is more alive than an incel. We also need an host to procreate. But we simply are not able to. Which means:
omae wa mou shindeiru
NANI?!
Just a word of advice, fellas: If you think of yourself as a virus (or something worse) and women as “hosts,” well, you aren’t going to get a lot of dates. And you shouldn’t get a lot of dates. Or any.
(That last little bit in the quote is a reference to an anime; according to Urban Dictionary the phrase “omae wa mou shindeiru” roughly translates to “you are already dead.”)
I don’t know what more to say to this line of argument than this:
I’ve heard people argue, in all seriousness, that we should be willing to overlook the violent misogyny that permeates incel culture because, well, that’s just a form of male bonding, and these communities provide support for depressed young men.
But that’s wrong, in every respect. We can’t dismiss the violent misogyny; not only is it awful and dangerous in itself, but, as the discussion above about viruses and hosts makes pretty clear, it’s also inextricably linked to the incels’ particular brand of self-hatred.
Incel communities like Incels.me aren’t “support groups.” They’re “kick-out-the-supports” groups. They lead already angry and depressed men to hate their lives even more — and to blame women for everything they think is wrong with them. This isn’t just a bunch of angry young men venting on the internet. Because nothing gets vented; the pressure just builds and builds. These communities are incubating future Elliot Rodgers and Alec Minassians.
As absurd as incel discussions often look — with their cracked anti-logic, their memes and jokes and anime references — this is what radicalization looks like, and it’s happening every hour of every day on the online venues where incels congregate.
These people are dangerous. Being a Incel should be grounds for involuntary 72-hour psychiatric hospitalization.
This has nothing to do with mental health, but being a danger to themselves and others.
I’m struggling to say something that doesn’t violate the comments policy.
I feel sorry for this guy’s parents. They didn’t anticipate this when he was born.
Misogyny isn’t the incel’s only problem; the self-hatred is remarkably strong. I pity these young men in part, because I have sons around their age. However, if my sons had presented with such concerning behavior or statements like that, I’d have sought help for them, and certainly, that help wouldn’t come from a Jordan Peterson aficionado (if there are that many in the mental health field – I hope not!).
This guy’s mother, just can’t win for trying. She has a kid, he blames solely her for his supposed ugliness. I don’t understand why it’s only her fault; like David said, this guy’s dad contributed one half of his genetics. Maybe, this incel thinks it’s solely his mom’s fault, because incels/MRAs believe women are the gatekeepers of sex?
However, I’m willing to bet Wizardcel is white, and as a white MRA-adjacent man, believes white women’s greatest purpose in life is to perpetuate the white race. Or, like one of these wastes of space put it, to “shit out white babies.” Mother Wizardcel is damned if she does, and damned if she doesn’t.
Definitely on the anti-support group thing. They actively reject the idea of getting help or getting better (that’s the whole “blackpill” premise that they claim to swallowed). Heck, if one of them says anything that amounts to looking on the bright side, it’s belittled as “cope,” which is a bad thing in that community’s eyes. (The preferred alternative is “rope,” or suicide, though few really active incels seem to actually get around to that.) When they talk about things that give them “lifefuel,” the will to go on, it’s always horrible things like mass shootings or acid attacks, or the prospect of same happening to their perceived enemies. Getting out of the incel echo chamber is the only way any of these guys is ever going to become a better human being.
There are levels of awfulness here, from the run-on sentence to the way these chucklefucks give innocent harmless minerals like the feldspathoids a bad name.
@David:
Oh, I think the algorithm used to apportion the blame is quite simple, something like:
if (self.isMisogynist()) {
blame_the_woman();
} else
assert(false, “unimplemented”);
}
The term “fractal wrongness” is commonly applied in situations like that one.
Your homework, Mr. Incel: Write the sentence “Beauty is as beauty does” one hundred times, then prepare a three page essay on this subject.
Only 3 pages? I think he’d need at least 50 just to even begin to hope to have a faint hint of understanding the concept.
Or he could just STFU.
…wait, so it’s selfish and meaningless to just have a baby for the sake of having a baby, but also procreating is the whole point of life?
Oh, right, I forgot, the problem isn’t procreating without consideration, the problem is that the woman wanted to have a baby, and then had one. Women aren’t supposed to have desires or agency or anything else, they’re merely vessels for men to procreate with. It’s totally logically consistent. /sarcasm
The day these dorks realize that nobody should live just to reproduce, and that not-reproducing doesn’t mean you’re dead or anywhere near it, is the day they all finally cease to be hideous and a waste of protoplasm. Until then, they’re already LDARing. And they have no one to blame for their lack of appeal but themselves and that self-assumed chip on their shoulders.
@Catalpa Exactly what I was thinking. Not reproducing is as bad as death, you must reproduce to truly live a life, but reproducing is irresponsible selfishness?
Perfect 10.0 in mental gymnastics.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this warped individual isn’t even physically ugly (maybe he’s got the wrong “canthal tilt” we all care about so much) any more than Rodgers or Minassian, but he has certainly made himself hideous.
I have not reproduced & feel no lack. I have 3 nieces & 5 nephews, two great nephews & around 2,000 students whom I have taught over the past 34 years. Some of these students remain in touch with me, others I hear from rarely, but there is a satisfaction in thinking of them living their lives & using the knowledge I gave them to do so. I both feel sorry for incels and am exasperated with them for making themselves miserable. Their pain is real & I regret that they feel it, but that pain is very much self inflicted. I simultaneoysly want to say “there, there”, and kick them in the ass. Sigh. The poor guys need to straighten up & get their collective act together.
Dear Incels,
looks are only a small part of what matters in finding a partner.
Personality, empathy, sense of humour and other traits are equally important.
You are oozing hate and contempt from every pore of your body.
This is a thing people notice.
You could be the hottest guy on the planet and still not get any dates if you act like this.
Your problem is entirely your own fault.
And since you refuse to learn that, you’ll be alone forever.
You want to read 50 pages of his inane nattering? Go for it. I draw the line at three.
Somehow I suspect this guy isn’t actually drawing any genetic conclusions – he just doesn’t understand or care that his supposed ugliness wasn’t particularly foreseeable (that is, if he doesn’t see his parents as particularly ugly). The urge to blame someone is strong.
And yes, obviously he thinks women are the ones who want children. Obviously this is only relevant if you decide after the fact that having a child was a bad idea.
@Lumipuna (nee Arctic Ape)
To be fair, in this case, the mother would be justified in deciding that.
I guessing he thinks that no man wants a baby, and they have to tricked into it by conniving women. Which totally contradicts the idea that the only thing that gives ones existence meaning is procreation. (can we get a list of highly accomplished people who never had children?)
Of course, that idea is a telephone game version of Jordan Peterson’s backdoor homophobic claim that those who have no children are abominations of nature.
On the other hand, maybe his mother smoked or drank when he was but a wee zygote, and he has good reason to blame her for his percieved defects.
Frankly, if his mother caused him to be ugly, she did him a big favor. Otherwise, he’d have to aquire some sort of eating disorder in order to have something besides his terrible personality to blame for the fact that he repulses most people.
I just feel bad for the mom and dad, because we know this can’t be the first time he’s gone on some irrational angry tear. No wonder the father just sat there blankly. This is probably their normal
I never said anything about *reading* it. I just think he’d require that much to maybe start to learn…anything.
Well, the father could/should have at least kicked his son’s ass for talking to his mother like that. Any of my boys pulled that, they would get, at the very least, the talking to of their lives.
@hexum
Why would people with an eating disorder repulse others?
@Hexum7
What Meerkat said^ I would like to know that as well.
I had a great memory until I went through the menopause. Suddenly, a few times a day, I had trouble remembering names or words or why I’d walked from one room to another.
After a while, I said to myself, why don’t I try harder to remember what I’ve forgotten? I didn’t have to try very hard before, but things are different now.
So I did. When I made a greater effort, I started to remember more. Yeah, it seems like I have to try too hard–but that’s life. I still forget things. Sometimes I never do remember them. Sometimes I remember them and then forget them again. But I remember more by making more of an effort.
TL; dr Incels, take responsibility for your own lives. All you have to lose is your self-loathing.
I don’t say this lightly, but the military was made for these guys. Get out of the hell of their own making, get outta town, grow up and be a man. How horrible it must be to live inside an incel mind.
This is the cringiest thing I’ve read all day. In this situation, the only person who thinks the writer is subhuman, is the writer himself.