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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A lot of it’s been said already, but I’ll sound off on a couple things:
1. There’s a story here about the corrupting nature of capitalism and how indulging their body image issues rather than resolving it has made this Eppley guy wealthy at the expense of anybody who’s had to deal with incels, them included. But that’s not the article that was written. It gets close to pinpointing Eppley as an enabler, but never makes it more than subtext.
2. Imagine all the money being spent on these surgeries that could be spent on other things. Hobbies. Necessities. Heck, even video games. I get that a lot of us are feeling the squeeze of the casino economy, but everybody needs to have some fun. My Panasonic FZ1000 was pretty pricey, but it probably cost a fraction of a single cosmetic surgery and I’ve been using it in urban exploration the past two years. I get a lot of fulfillment out of it because I feel like I’m being creative and capturing something that will last.
3. This quote:
I attended a sex party once and noticed two things very quickly: everyone was having fun, and everybody involved came in different shapes, colours, sizes and ages. I was actually one of the younger and fitter guys in attendance, and I’ve still got a belly and big thighs. But nobody was judging anybody else for their bodies because everyone there wanted to have a good time. Everyone understood consent had to be given explicitly in all cases. I had a blast.
But I when it was over and I was collapsing into bed in my bachelor apartment, I was still the same ol’ Katamount. Sure, I had experienced something special for a few hours, but I wasn’t a different man like these incels seem to expect from cosmetic surgery:
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.
It’s like these guys are on the cusp of a realization about how shallow this all is and all the surgery and all the sex in the world doesn’t actually change the way you feel about yourself, but they still manage to wring the grievance out of every interaction with other people and they just keep fuelling their loathing of themselves and others with it. You just wish they’d make that connection and never go to an incel forum again….
*sigh*
The FZ1000 is a solid camera by the way. Probably the best bridge camera between point-and-shoot and DSLR out there, despite being five years old now.
There’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy about this, considering how incels are forever raging about women deceptively getting plastic surgery, wearing makeup, dying their hair, and wearing padded clothing, etc., which makes it difficult for them to assess whether a women is “truly” a 10 or just faking it. If they marry a woman and have a baby with her, they don’t want any genetic surprises. God forbid the infant be a 4. (As we all learned in Biology Assfax 101, babies inherit their mathematical hotness from their mothers, and it’s always exactly the same number.)
Thankfully, women don’t tend to brutally assess men with the eye of a livestock breeder, the way incels do. But for a group that is so obsessed with genetics and inherited traits, incels apparently see no issue with plastic surgery as long as they’re the ones subverting their partner’s expectations of what their children might look like. If an incel gets plastic surgery, it’s restoring them to their rightful status as Chads at the top of the hierarchy. If a woman gets plastic surgery, she’s a deceiving harpy trying to branch swing above her level.
@Catalpa
If the quotes from the article are any indication, getting a Chadoplasty turns them into even bigger creeps. One of the core axioms of inceldom is that if a man is sufficiently good-looking, women will accept any amount of abuse from him. Transform into Brad Pitt, they think, and they’ll have access to an endless supply of women willing to be used and discarded. (The cynic in me thinks that some of these guys may also want to make it harder for past victims to identify them.) Naturally, when this fails to happen, they blame the surgeon.
Incel plastic surgery is less about self-acceptance than sculpting a mask for domination.
Dr. Eppley seems pretty unethical. How can a smart, professional businessman and astute marketer not know where his patients are coming from? And why isn’t he referring them to counseling?
I find it interesting that some of the incels are so fixated on perfecting their looks as a way to get laid and yet a good deal of media – movies, TV, etc. – has men who are at best average looking who have wives or girlfriends who would rate higher on most rankings of looks. The good-looking women see through the average or unattractive exterior to the inner beauty … but it works the other way as well.
In other words, even if you look like a Chad, if you have the personality of an Incel, nobody will want you.
Perhaps instead of spending all their money to look like a Chad, Incels should be going for a personality transplant.
I don’t know if Campbell could have been Batman.
But, I could totally see him as Giffen-era Booster Gold (especially if we throw in Nathan Fillion as Ted Kord!Blue Beetle :D)
I’d give my metaphorical left tit to see that film.
I’d’ve liked to see Bruce Campbell as Ted “Wildcat” Grant.
And dam up that money stream? I don’t think the guy seems unethical, he pretty blatantly is.
@K., Britgeekgrrl:
Campbell as Booster Gold. That’s brilliant. He’d have to dye his hair, but yeah, Campbell could totally pull off ‘football jock with a heart of gold trying to bluster over his self-esteem issues and making himself a joke in the process’.
Anyone see Campbell as an aged Elvis Presley in Bubba-Hotep? Both his acting and the makeup were incredible.
@Kevin R; WWTH; Buttercup Q Skullpants:
You’ve all elaborated on what I was just thinking about: For years, women have been held to these impossible beauty standards, and now the same thing is happening to men. Part of me is like: “Great! Tit for tat! What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander!”. But seriously, saddling men with the same shallow, appearance-obsessed bullshit is no improvement.
I definitely understand the urge for more psychological screening for BDD in plastic surgery as an industry…but I just know that, like other seemingly-harmless policies I’ve heard of, it would be used for gatekeeping members of vulnerable groups.
In the case of plastic surgery, I’m thinking of trans people, especially trans women.
There’s probably some way for a transphobic counselor to twist the person’s responses into BDD or BDD-adjacent to keep them from gender confirmation surgery or facial plastic surgery/facial reconstruction.
Idk, I know it sounds paranoid, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I could see someone doing.
@MK
Yeah, that’s a risk, but gatekeeping is already a focus of ongoing attention (both for those who want to keep/expand it and those trying to weaken it further/eradicate it).
There are also good and easy ways to separate good faith testing of person to see if your treatment will work on them from bad faith gatekeeping.
In particular, if it’s your first surgery on a particular part of your body, and you’ve had fewer than, IDK, maybe 6? surgeries total, then fine. No problems.
But as soon as you come back for the second surgery on the same body part, doctors should be investigating why. Because if a competent doc did the surgery the first time and the person is still seeking out surgery then you have a significant risk that new surgery will not actually fix what the person doesn’t like. This doesn’t mean a second surgery on the same body part (or a 6th or 7th surgery total) is impossible or forbidden, but there should be some basic investigation.
Wait up, now. This guy wanted to have sex, had tens of thousands of dollars to spare, and he lived in the friggin’ Netherlands, yet his solution was to… get plastic surgery? I know I shouldn’t laugh, but seriously…
Has anyone else here played a game called Misao? Seeing incels talk about plastic surgery strongly reminded me of a scene in that game. It’s a pretty dark game that brings up themes like bullying and sexual assault (though none of the latter is shown on screen) and there is a lot of gore (but the game has very stylized pixel graphics).
Anyway, spoiler warning, that game featured a villain who committed a horrifying murder of a young girl because he was continuously rejected for his looks as a teenager, and later tried to fix his face with plastic surgery only to feel that people loved his “mask” and not him, and his monologue here is really similar to what I’ve seen above.
There was a post here on WTHM about incels who believed Brad Pitt wasn’t enough of an alpha and was secretly being cuckolded by women. Complete with photoshops that stretched his face to make him look like BJ Blazkowicz.
I know we’ve shook our heads trying to understand the obsession with Brad Pitt in particular before, given that he’s now well into middle age, likes having children (OK, fine, these people would blame all that on Angie), and kinda beta. I’ve never really followed his career, so now I’m wondering — is he still cast as a hunk very often? Because if not, the obsession is even weirder than I thought it was.
It was always pretty weird anyway, since I seem to remember that in the 90s, he was trying to get away from always being cast as the pretty boy and nothing else.
I have Body Dysmorphic Disorder. From here, as an afflicted layperson, it looks like these forums are giving people BDD. FFS.
Suicide rate for BDD is much higher than typical.
They’re killing other men, along with women. I can’t believe anyone defends this ideology.
@Catalpa,
oh my god 🙁
Rabid Rabbit: Brad Pitt’s career these days is a mix of romantic leads (BY THE SEA, ALLIED), action heroes (FURY, WORLD WAR Z), more thoughtful sorts of protagonists (MONEYBALL, WAR MACHINE), and character parts (12 YEARS A SLAVE, the new Tarantino). He seems happiest in the last category.
I am put in mind of a remark someone once made about Alec Baldwin, that he was a character actor who had the misfortune to look like a movie star, with the result that he wasted precious years playing bland heroes rather than the sorts of parts that really suited him. Pitt always gives the impression of enjoying himself more when playing a goofy sidekick or a guy in over his head than when he’s the super-confident man in charge. I suspect that, apart from the money, he would rather have been the new Harry Dean Stanton than Tom Cruise Mark 2.0.
Which, of course, makes the incels’s idea of him as the ultra-male all the odder.
Agreeing with others who say this surgeon is super unethical. I’ve had several cosmetic surgeries and each time I’ve had a consultation I’ve had to show them that there is a significant “flaw” and have a discussion about my reasons for wanting it dealt with surgically. My first surgeon even outright said to me “this surgery will not fix any problems in your life.”
What the actual fuck.
I mean, it’s obvious all these guys want is more privilege. They don’t want to do any work, any effort, they just want everything handed to them on a silver plate.
But do they really think all it takes is a pretty face? Where the hell do they even get that idea from?? Whre do they get their role-models from??
It’s not crappy and outdated tv sitcoms. It’s not really movies that I know of. It’s not even porn (and they don’t seem invested in becoming porn actors either). Videogames maybe? Millionare lifestyle reality shows?
I mean, even movie superstars don’t live in tropical paradises partying and fucking all the dmn time. Acting is work. You need to learn it. You need to practice it. You need to go out and get casted. Do they think someone came up to Brad Pitt’s house to offer him a stelar role? Hell, even starring a movie with a billion dollar budget takes work and commitment for months if not a whole year or more.
They are mistaking being the useless child of a billionare with having a cute face.
Also, as the victim of a fruit fly infestation in my single-room apartment, I know once those things show up it’s super hard to get rid of them. But even I can keep them away from the bedroom and take daily measures to keep the population of flies at check. It takes work, but not an unreasonable amount of it. Mostly keeping it clean, not leaving food around to rot and using some bug spray in the right places.
Maybe Jordan Peterson was not that far off with the “clean your room” stuff? I mean, it’s a really low bar, but…
Are they uaware that virtually no one becomes the richest 1%? That’s why they are the 1%. Even movie stars don’t usually belong there, however rich they become.
They just loathe the whole of humanity, themselves and their “role models” included.
Not only that, you need to be willing to regularly put in 12-20 hour workdays, including hours tediously repeating the same 7 minute scene til the director is satisfied. And there’s physical danger, even if there’s no stunts per se; the set has a million things to run into, trip over, burn yourself on, etc. Any kind of physically dramatic scene comes with extra risks of pulling something, falling wrong, etc. Hell, Brad Pitt nearly burned to death on the set of Inglorious Basterds.
What an interesting thread.
From previous incel coverage on this blog, I’d gotten the impression that incels generally rejected or ignored the prospect of plastic surgery, like everything else classed under self-improvement. Is this guy an outlier, or rather representative?
@Lumipuna,
That’s an excellent point. And it seems that this guy is not alone, going on the article. So I wonder what their fellow incels think of this?