By David Futrelle
New York Magazine has a remarkable cover story out now on incels — more specifically, on the subset of the “involuntarily celibate” who obsess endlessly about getting plastic surgery in order to transform themselves from supposedly hideous unfuckable monsters into handsome Chads with perfectly chiseled faces.
For some incels — as the story’s author, Alice Hines, makes clear — plastic surgery isn’t just a fantasy. They shell out tens of thousands of dollars to get the procedures they think will fix their lives. Spoiler Alert: It never does.
Hines’ story centers around two central characters — one a surgery-addicted incel calling himself Truth4lie, the other an Indiana plastic surgeon named Dr. Barry Eppley, the go-to-guy for dudes who want to turn themselves into Chads by artificial means.
The story of Truth4lie is not a happy one. As Hines tells it, he began his descent into the incel underworld on the Sluthate forum after several unsuccessful years as a would-be pickup artist. Sluthate, which began as PUAhate, was morphing from a pickup-debunking forum into a forum for incels obssessed with their alleged ugliness,
Truth4lie took “the black pill,” a concentrated dose of noxious misogyny and body-dysmorphic self-hatred; instead of memorizing pickup routines he spent his time sitting in what he described as his dark, dingy, fruit-fly infested apartment railing against the allegedly shallow women he felt were rejecting him for his less-than-perfect appearance. And more and more he started to fantasize about getting the plastic surgery necessary to “correct” his self-diagnosed facial flaws and transform him into a Chad.
Then he took the plunge, flying from his home in the Netherlands to Indiana to visit Dr. Eppley to get a jaw implant and a “rhinoplasty revision” to correct an earlier nose job he’d decided made him look too feminine.
Truth4lie had high hopes that the surgery would change his life utterly. “I need women, lots of women, to make up for my miserable life,” he wrote on the Sluthate forums.
I want to live in hotels in tropical countries and live a playboy life there, only fucking hot blonde European girls.
Truth4lie did feel transformed by the surgery — for a time, at least. But he kept noticing new “imperfections” that he felt needed fixing, and returned again and again to Eppley’s clinic for “revisions” and new procedures, one of which, Hines notes, resulted in “an open wound that took months to close.”
He continued getting surgeries in the Netherlands, but he was never fully satisfied. The last time Hines talked to him he was in the hospital recovering from a suicide attempt triggered by the excessive swelling caused by his latest surgery. But he told Hines he was going to keep going until some plastic surgeon finally got it right. “The prospect of a better surgery result is keeping me alive,” he explained.
He’s not the only incel who has discovered that surgery can’t fix all that ails them. Hines quotes an incel called LegendOfBrickTamland, who found himself getting weirdly angry that people were nicer to him post-surgery. “Getting treated better after surgery feels sickening,” he posted on the forums after getting $30,000 worth of work done.
It’s like, I am the same fucking person, and yet I am somehow better because I spent some money and had a man cut my face up.
Hines’ article is dotted with “before and after” selfies that incels have posted on what is now Lookism — depicting themselves as they are and, through the magic of photoshop, how they dream they could be after plastic surgery. None of them are ugly; indeed most would score reasonably well on the ten-point scale of looks that incels and other manosphereans are so obsessed with.
It’s certainly possible that plastic surgery could make them look a bit more like their idealized photoshopped doubles — with their male-model cheekbones and stronger chins.
But it hardly seems worth the pain and expense, especially when it’s so abundantly clear that the real problem isn’t with the precise configuration of the bones in their faces but with the poisonous ideas in their heads, ideas reinforced daily by the other commenters on Lookism and other incel sites.
But if Truth4lie’s story is a sad but predictable cautionary tale about the futility of the quest for physical perfection, the Dr. Eppley’s story is in many ways more disturbing. One of the reasons he’s become an idol to incels seeking Chadification is that — unlike some plastic surgeons who turn away wannabe patients who seem to suffer from body-dysmorphic disorder — Eppley apparently takes on all comers, no questions asked.
Indeed, he’s evidently so incurious about the motivations of his patients that — despite his huge incel fanbase — he told Hines that he didn’t even know what incels were until she brought the topic up with him.
And that’s a problem, I think. While I believe people should be allowed to get pretty much whatever plastic surgery they want if they think it will make them feel better about themselves, this approach can become a hugely problematic one when you’re dealing with a community of bitter, self-hating misogynists preaching utterly delusional nonsense not only about their own allegedly imperfect faces and bodies but also about the relations between men and women.
These are people who literally believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that no man who is less than an 8/10 on their supposedly objective scale of attractiveness can ever hope to have sex with any women of what they consider reasonable attractiveness. These are people who think that the mythical Chad literally lives a life of financial independence and endless sex, coming home at night to “a threesome with two supermodels,” as one incel put it in a forum post that Hines quotes.
Given their ridiculous assumptions about the allegedly magic power of “Chadlike” looks, there is no way that any amount of surgery will ever satisfy a hardcore incel — even if they’re not, like Truth4lie, obsessing endlessly about imaginary flaws that no amount of surgery can fix, or, like LegendOfBrickTamland, getting angry that people are treating them better. Because no amount of surgery, no matter how innovative, no matter how skillfully performed, is going to bring you nightly supermodel threesomes. Because no one in the world is having those.
Again, the real solution for incels isn’t implanting silicone to “fix” their chins; it’s extracting them from the incel subculture, and draining out all the poison in their brains.
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Truth4lie’s case sounds like a textbook example of body dysmorphic disorder, right down to the attempted suicide. Just take a look at the Mayo Clinic’s page on it and see for yourself.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/body-dysmorphic-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20353938
Unfortunately, given the incel community’s aversion to any kind of mental health services the only way this can end is in his death. Even among their kind, it’s a senseless waste of human life that could be easily prevented if he only knew how to accept his body as it is.
And no wonder Eppley doesn’t turn anyone away- apparently the man has a less than stellar reputation himself if this news article is any indication.
https://www.ibj.com/articles/2294-doc-sues-web-savvy-ex-patient
I don’t know about you, but I’m leaning toward his ex-patient’s side of the story here.
It’s tempting to imagine Eppley as looking like the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills in Escape from LA:
This post reminded me of ContraPoints’ latest video, where she talks about her own surgeries and the incels’ interest in “looksmaxing.” Here it is and I recommend it; she talks about things like self-perception, aging, and style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9mspMJTNEY
As for the desired Chad-face, when I was 17 I did a school presentation on Franz Kafka. One of the transparencies I made (the classroom still had an old-fashioned slide projector) was a photo of him at age 30. I kept this transparency in my folder for the rest of the term because:
a) transparencies are pretty
b) Franz Kafka, age 30, was also pretty, and it cheered me up to look at him – even though he had a skinny little face, not a squarish Chadly one
I can never forget that Anders Breivik was also wildly looks-obsessed, and had a shit ton of cosmetic surgeries that didn’t improve HIM any, either.
And yes, there’s a moral in that, incels. Take it to heart and heed it, if you have the wits to understand. Climb out of the crab bucket. Go on. DO IT.
@David F.
Way to harsh my buzz. Sob.
Okay, I’m having to rethink my whole elective-plastic-surgery-will-surely-transform-my-life-for-the-better stance because apparently AOC disagrees with this point of view. Who knew!
Here’s a Good Story About Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Telling Off Her Sexist Boss in Her Restaurant Days
https://jezebel.com/heres-a-good-story-about-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-telli-1835119961
Seriously, I love this woman more each day.
You’d think the story of Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery obsession would be a cautionary tale to these guys. But given some of the racism floating around the incel world some of them would assume a black man’s obsession has nothing to do with them.
As they say, true ugliness is on the inside.
How pathetic of them.
I’m not sure that’s the message he took away from it.
I feel incredibly conflicted about these incel types. On the one hand, I see people who are in real pain (self inflicted or otherwise) who desperately need help. On the other hand, their attitudes and worldviews are so repugnant I find myself doubting whether they deserve it, which is not a thought I like.
What also doen’t help is that I could see myself and other people I know having turned out like that if circumstances had been slightly different during a hard time in our lives.
Y’know, of all three pictures they show in the article from Lookism — I prefer the original in all three. There’s just something more *human* about them, instead of that weird uncanny valley of ‘this is what a man looks like’.
I mean, I struggle with body issues myself. I’m obese and somewhat genderqueer, and I get very frustrated the world doesn’t want to take me as I am. But…I dunno, there’s just something very sad about being so sure just another fix will change everything.
I’d give him the suggestion that they like to give each other, but I’m not that mean.
I think Bob Chipman had a great, if kind of mean-spirited, take on this article. He considers it karmic justice that the pressure to be conventionally attractive that women have suffered with in our society for so long is now coming home to roost for the men who crafted and enforced those unrealistic beauty standards in the first place. Yet another notch on the long and growing list of examples of toxic masculinity eating men alive.
I’m reminded of an article I read a few years ago about how eating disorders, once stereotyped as a predominantly female illness, were becoming increasingly prevalent among men. The article had a pretty interesting take: namely, that superhero movies have had an unintended negative consequence in this regard. Male action heroes in the past, outside the “beefcake era” (Ahnold, Stallone, etc.) of the ’80s, were usually ordinary-looking guys like Bruce Willis, George Clooney, and Keanu Reeves, and before that Harrison Ford, Burt Reynolds, Robert de Niro, and Clint Eastwood. Sure, they were attractive, but not unrealistically so; they looked like they could pass for your average Joe on the street.
Then came 300, with a male cast comprised of hyper-chiseled demigods flexing their muscles and showing off their ripped physiques throughout the film. This wound up being part of the film’s legacy, as suddenly, Gerard Butler as King Leonidas became the ideal for Hollywood actors cast in superhero movies. Marvel and DC movies came to fetishize their manly-man heroes with their washboard abs and jacked-up biceps, and their actors frequently spoke to the press about the grueling training and diet regimens they went through to get that look. Furthermore, whereas the musclebound action heroes of the ’80s were typecast in action movies, this generation of Adonises also makes up our romantic leads. Young men, with these guys as their big-screen idols, began to see that as the ideal, and anything less as imperfection.
At the same time that superhero movies were setting the standard for Hollywood masculinity, we also saw the backlash against Twilight. To be sure, that series had a litany of problems from a storytelling perspective and a moral one, but in hindsight, so did a lot of the criticism they received. Lindsay Ellis has a great video on the subject from the perspective of a female ex-Twilight hater; as somebody who was in college when the backlash was in full swing and often took part in it himself, I remember the male side of it as being driven by a lot of machismo. The series “ruined” vampires, they argued, because now they were all a bunch of wimps and sissies. Edward Cullen would get his ass whooped in a fight with a “real” man. (Oh, the schadenfreude I had at the news of Robert Pattinson possibly playing Batman…) Being a “pretty boy” now carried with it the implication that you liked the D. And to tie this back to the previous paragraph, Twilight also gave us the character of Jacob; Taylor Lautner put on a ton of muscle in order to keep the part in the sequels.
All of this played right into the “neomasculinity” promoted by the nascent manosphere, which proclaimed that a “real man” was somebody who met an incredibly narrow set of standards for masculinity, one that transformed them into a real-life Tyler Durden in mind, body, and soul, and that anybody who didn’t meet such was weak and deficient and could have their manhood called into question. In other words, the culture had finally produced a male counterpart to the impossible physical standards imposed upon women for generations, and ironically, it came in the name of male empowerment. In yet another case of psychological projection on the subject of gender relations (“how come all these stuck-up bitches won’t go out with me?” “maybe you should consider your choice of words”), the preachers of neomasculinity did to the men who listened to them exactly what they accuse feminists of doing to women: mentally enslaving an entire gender under the guise of liberating them.
These might be the most pathetic humans on the planet. Yes you dumbass, if you change the outside of you it’s still the same person on the inside. It’s difficult to explain to these guys because they still struggle with the concept of makeup. How girls don’t naturally have red lips or smocky eyes is difficult for them.
BTW, I don’t recommend reading the comments at David’s link. Ew.
Aside: I started thinking about Bruce Campbell after posting that picture of him in his twisted Escape from LA makeup, and found myself wondering if he’s considered a Chad. I doubt it somehow as he has a sense of humor and a willingness to be made foolish/vulnerable in film roles if it makes the film work (just look at the crap he goes through as Ash in the Evil Dead films!).
I’m always surprised, when incels post pictures of themselves, just how normal and even quite good looking they are. I sometimes feel a flare of sympathy reading the forum when they talk about how lonely they are (quickly quashed by the utter disgusting bile they usually spew in the next sentence) because our culture does treat apparently “unattractive” people appallingly – especially if it’s combined with shyness. But they aren’t even below average in their own skewed perception of things.
I spent my late teens and early twenties intermittently obsessed with the idea that I was ugly and that this meant I didn’t really deserve a place in the world, so I should understand where they are coming from, but it’s so clear that this isn’t only about insecurity and beauty norms – they are raging because they aren’t afforded the special status in society they feel, deep down, that is theirs by right. They want to wield the power of exceptional beauty, rather than be better looking in order to feel excepted and loved – which makes just about as much sense as spending your whole life in agonies because your genetic make up precludes you from being a catwalk model.
While most people are perfectly lovely to look at, only a tiny amount get to be strikingly beautiful, and they do enjoy certain privileges because of this. If you can’t get your head round that as a normal person you’ll never be happy.
Every time I see this kind of stuff I think of Eliot Rodger, their ‘patron saint’. He was conventionally handsome, rich and ‘connected’.
He is the proof, if any were needed, that this is an internal problem.
@Nequam:
If you haven’t read it, check out Bruce Campbell’s autobiography, If Chins Could Kill. It’s a great read and describes his childhood growing up with Sam Raimi– both of them definitely got a kick out of subverting Campbell’s good looks in the most absurd and horrible ways they could imagine.
(Speaking of Batman, my friends & I have always thought that Campbell would have made a great Batman as he had the good looks to make a credible Bruce Wayne while also the physical chops to pull off the Caped Crusader too. But I guess he never had the star power to be considered for the role ☹️)
As the only other red head in my class use to say to me “no amount of icing is gonna fix a bad sugar cookie” granted it was a cooking class but I carry that advice to this day.
@Lainy: Especially when the cookie has too much salt ?
Just some culinary humour there. OK, OK, I’ll see myself out…
More to the point, if someone is addicted to your product, even if your product is used non-addictively by 99% of your clientele, choosing to make money off the addicted is ethically problematic at the very, very least, and is almost certainly just ethically wrong.
If you’re choosing willful ignorance about which clients of yours are addicted to your product, that’s just wrong.
We can argue about appropriate response all we want and how that might impinge on freedom or thwart individual agency, etc. etc. But we can’t even begin to decide what to do about an addicted client until we know that they have an addiction.
Most body dysmorphia isn’t accompanied by addiction to body modification, but it can be. But if you have body dysmorphia and you’re seeking a second plastic surgery, that’s a good time to have a serious consultation/conversation about whether the proposed surgery has any chance of success. This doc is refusing to examine the possibility of body dysmorphia co-occurring in repeat patients. That’s just wrong.
I believe this is common when BDD sufferers undergo plastic surgery, and one reason why some in the industry call for greater psychological screening. There isn’t an objective, physical fix to “imperfection” that’s rooted in an obsessive and delusional image of the self. The only fix is to recover from BDD.
There’s a quote from the movie Looker that comes to mind.
Statistically, people who are conventionally attractive are treated somewhat better than people who are not. (Though how much of this is due to the fact that conventional attractiveness also tends to fall along the lines of privilege- being white, rich, abled, etc. is a bit nebulous.)
However, the gap in how people are treated is nowhere near what the incels are imagining it to be. Especially if you’re talking about how people who actually know you at all treat you. An incels might be blindly attractive, but anyone who spends more than a few seconds talking to one is going to have alarm bells going off in their head immediately.
Frankly, I’m mostly worried that this is just going to lead to even more entitlement from the incels. If they think that buying a woman dinner or a drink obligates her to having sex with them, what are they going to expect from women in exchange for spending tens of thousands of dollars?
I’ll reiterate what I said in a previous thread. I kind of resent that this article has gone so viral. For decades it has been the dorm for women to take extreme measures to be conventionally beautiful. In some circles, such as entertainment industry or among the wealthy, it’s pretty much expected that a woman gets some cosmetic surgery. Why is it so shocking and sad when men do It? Because suffering for beauty is supposed to be a woman thing.
Although I don’t want anyone of any gender to suffer body image issues or be held to unrealistic beauty standards, I absolutely refuse to have sympathy for men who are all ‘woe is me’ for not looking like Chris Hemsworth, but still believe cultural attitudes toward women and our appearances are just fine. It’s not even just incel guys who think like that either. I also have a hearty fuck off for the men who only got woke on these issues when they started affecting men. Where were men in the 1990s when famous actresses started turning into lollipops and millions of young women strove to follow suit? Laughing at feminists for trying to tackle the problem. That’s where.
Imagine if either one of those incels had spent 10% of the money they blew on cosmetic procedures on therapy instead. Or, in the case of Truth4Lie, on weekly housekeeping. I don’t care what you look like, any woman you manage to lure home is going to flee screaming at her first sight/smell of the fly-infested garbage heap he apparently lives in.