“IncelExit” is a small subreddit devoted to helping those who’ve fallen into the incel rabbit hole and who are looking for “support and help with a pathway out.” It brings together “normies” who want to help with incels actually willing to listen to advice — a rarity in most incel communities, where every proposed solution is denounced as a “cope” or worse.
Some of the most inspiring posts and comments in IncelExit come from incels or almost-incels who have managed to figure out their own way out. I ran across this one during a recent visit to the subreddit:
I think he’s on to something here. There’s no better cure for either the “red pill” and the “black pill” than an understanding of what life is really like for women in our society — paying attention to what women say about their lives rather than giving yourself over to red pill fantasies in which every women is riding the “cock carousel” and having sex with a different Chad every night. Those fantasies are only convincing to people who’ve trapped themselves within the thought bubble of the manosphere, where all knowledge or supposed knowledge about women comes from the mouths of other men (and a miniscule number of red pill women.)
The way for men to learn about the real lives of women is to listen to women, not bitter men. And if you listen carefully enough and long enough, you’ll develop empathy — the same empathy that xSeyoo credits for pulling out of the incel morass. Men have problems just as women do, but they are hardly the most persecuted creatures on planet earth.
Looking through his comment history on Reddit, I see that in the month since he posted this comment he’s actually found himself a girlfriend, so he’s no longer even an “incel by definition.” Indeed, his rejection of incel logic has enabled to do what most incels would consider impossible at his age. I wish him the best.
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A positive post! How lovely! We’ve got to take breaks from the slimepits sometimes.
Congratulations, mate! I wish only positive things for him and his partner. I hope he continues to learn, grow and benefit from empathy and love. That said, I doubt I’ll ever cease to be flabbergasted that so many men can’t grasp the concept that women, in general, respond positively to genuine common decency, respect and kindness. None of this you-get-out-what-you-put-in manipulation, no Brownie points scheming, no happy wife, happy life bullshit. Sigh.
Hear hear! But I will never cease to be staggered that so many men genuinely consider “realizing women [were] just people” to be such a massive mind-exploding revelation.
If we had a COVID vaccine even one-half as powerful and durable in its effects as toxic masculinity is, we’d all be rushing around right now kissing strangers in crowded bars in a delirium of euphoric relief.
I’m going to go against the flow and resist offering him cookies for realizing that women are human. I mean, it’s fine I guess that he’s no longer an incel, but is it really worth celebrating that he meets minimum standards for a decent person now?
YMMV and you can celebrate what you want, or not, but these days, I’m willing to celebrate any crumb of decency in anybody.
Yeah I agree with PoM. Especially as he still called himself “an incel by definition”. It’s like with “reformed” Nazis, the bar for respect is (and should be) very high.
Yah, and I understand that urge, but that’s putting the bar so low for these men that it’s literally on the ground and all they have to do is step over it to get confetti and a parade. When I get a parade for recognizing men as human, I’ll get on board with giving men ticker tape for the reverse, ya know?
But maybe I’m just grumpy right now because my city decided to wake me up THREE times with curfew alerts and I’m pretty fucking pissed.
I’m going to go with PoM and Cyborgette here. If he truly wants to change, great. But I’m not going to give him a Pat on the back just yet. Seen way too many former alt-rightists claim to be leftists after learning a little bit about Marx but then still being bigots (*cough* Vaush, Xanderhal *cough*). I want to see evidence of real-world action to repair the damage people have done before I accept them into the fold.
@PoM
You’re in Louisville, right? Stay safe.
@Naglfar
Yes, and I’m fine except for my pissivity at being denied sleep. Thanks for caring though!
I wonder how much of it is coming from TV instead. I mean, the other men must be getting it from somewhere, ultimately.
And meanwhile, TV (and movies) routinely depicts the world as fairly strongly resembling the caricature manosphereans seem to believe in. In particular, the male characters have a clearly assigned sexual pecking-order: the charismatic heroes get no shortage of opportunities, and random extras can sometimes be part of visible couples, but main characters who are sidekicks are typically doomed by the writers to an endless string of failures, and usually to at least occasional mockery for even having tried. And, of course, unless the role is “grandmother” or something similar, or to be unattractive for laughs, the women are almost 100% conventionally attractive. Meanwhile LGBTQ characters, whom manosphereans often seem to forget exist in the real world, are passing rare on TV, or were until quite recently.
Hollywood, in short, depicts a heteronormative world of Stacies with the odd Becky and a grandma or two, along with a handful of Chads who get nearly all of the action and usually at least one prominent “incel” (non-ideologically) per series.
Oddly, for their otherwise fairly progressive outlook, the 1990s-era Star Trek series are particularly bad for this. Unattractive women are practically nonexistent, leaving aside infrequent alien instances (where the males of the same species tend to be likewise unappealing to humans). Men in leading roles have no shortage of opportunities, though vary as to how commonly they actually accept these. Men not in leading roles, especially the ones with nerdier jobs, consistently fail, and frequently it gets played for laughs. La Forge, Harry Kim, even Data fit the pattern. Rare instances of apparent success inevitably go horribly wrong in some way. And there’s basically no LGBTQ representation at all.
The TV/movie universe clearly divides the men into inherent winners and inherent losers in love, and longer-running TV series additionally drive home that membership in these categories is utterly immutable. If a born loser tries to change things with some sort of makeover, expect an embarrassingly spectacular failure, likely played for laughs. If he seems to finally have a stroke of luck, it will turn out she’s a space vampire (Voyager “Favorite Son”), or just using him to get something of value (Voyager “Inside Man”; also the 2nd X-Men film), or similarly, and he’ll swiftly end up with a broken heart if not dead. If he gets a “magical makeover” from an outside source, he’ll become temporarily luckier in love, right up until the moment whatever-it-is turns back into a pumpkin, and not for one second longer. And so on.
Of course, much of this is explicable as the result of various non-ideologically-motivated factors in production, such as most shows (especially before the mid-2000s or so) tending to reset things at the end of every episode to the status quo ante — this means by definition only the characters who started the series already in a long-term relationship will have lasting romances — and the prevalence of “Stacies” is attributable to the male gaze in production, and so forth. The results are inarguable, though: a fictional world that resembles rather closely the ontology of the typical incel, MGTOW, or similarly.
Television has rotted their brains.
Why not everyone’s? Because most people get inoculated, I guess, by contradictory data from actual reality. But the more socially isolated get most of their model for what goes on in relationships from what is modeled for them in fiction, and so TV rots their brains.
@Surplus
TV could play a role, but I’m more inclined to point to YouTube these days. YouTube’s algorithms purposely serve users videos that it thinks they will want to watch, and multiple studies have shown that this means that people are steered towards more and more extreme right wing content. Even in my own experience I’ve seen this, a while ago I was rewatching some of Anita Sarkeesian’s old videos for something and all the recommendations in the sidebar were from alt-rightists like Carl of Swindon and Thunderf00t.
Scary:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/9/24/1980333/-Trump-fascism-and-the-crisis-of-democracy-This-is-how-an-American-takeover-happens
How fascism ascends: 2020 election may be the crisis of democracy that opens the door to a coup
I love this guy’s narrative. That said, there’s some serious BS on the subreddit as well. Xseyoo, the guy David quotes, also posted about improving his looks and then getting a girlfriend. Here’s one response:
And here’s another response in a different vein. Please do click through. Oops! No need to click through. The photos showed up practically life size.
Gosh, I can’t imagine why this post was earlier deleted by the subreddit’s mods.
PS: He looks fine in the before photo. He’s a little skinny, something pretty common for teenagers. (Not me, never me. But some teenagers.)
@kimstu : I will pull you one even stranger : a lot of people don’t consider other people to be, well, people. I think it’s mostly men who are affected, but it may be a perspective problem.
Eyeballing it I would say somewhere like 1/5 or 1/6 of people genuingly didn’t get the revelations that they are not the only sentient being, and more importantly all that entail. If you want an easy to see example, Trump really doesn’t get that other people exist.
Yeah, I’m giving this dude the same side-eye I give “”””former”””” alt-righters.
@Kat
And this is why I’m still cynical of this subreddit. I’m sure there are people there who genuinely do want to change or help others change, but there seem to be others who just want to spread the typical incel bucket of crabs mentality.
@Ohlmann
I’m not sure if it’s that they think other people don’t exist or that other people exist solely to serve them. When conservatives were protesting to demand their states reopen to let them get a haircut, it’s because they thought they were entitled to the labor of women and PoC.
@Naglfjar : I don’t think they feel entitled to the work of thoses peoples specifically, but that they don’t realize thoses workers are sentient like them, but are rather more like piece of furnitures.
I see two reasons to think so :
Of course, distinguishing my hypothesis from your own is pretty hard, doubly so because it might be a bit of A and a bit of B.
That being said, I have frequented people with which the fact they don’t understand other people are sentient is much more obvious. At least one is particulary jarring because he don’t act callously, but it’s often pretty clear he don’t understand other people have agency. Like he is alway surprised that other people have obligations.
I’m actually willing to give this guy a cookie. Maybe not a super-duper awesome cookie, but a cookie. Y’know why? He’s taking a step in the right direction. Sure, he’s got a long way to go, but he’s actually making an effort to improve as a person, and in a world where being awful far too often seems to be not only the easiest way but the most rewarding way, any step towards a more positive and empathic outlook should be welcomed.
I decided to look through the top posts of all time on that sub, and here are the distilled essence of the top five:
Truly a support sub for the ages.
I’m with @Sharl. I think he deserves a small cookie. Not a whole gateau with Swiss chocolate and real cream, but a small cookie because progress is progress.
@PoM
I took a look at the posts. The main issue I’m noticing is that they all still seem to be using incel rhetoric or self-identifying as incels, which makes me think they aren’t really leaving incelism. I see maybe glimmers of improvement here and there, but over all it looks like there’s still a lot to work through for many of these people before they have fully detoxified themselves from incel ideology.
I mean, best of luck, but I’m still giving side-eye.
@Naglfar
Yeah, when they keep discussing the blue pill and the black pill and whatnot, it makes it hard to take their reform seriously. And I read the whole “online dating guide” and a lot of the comments, and they are still putting sexual success with women at the forefront of their identities. They’re “exiting” the incel culture only in that they no longer believe they are undatable; they haven’t graduated yet to the idea that their value is not tied to their dating success.
From what I’ve seen, this is pretty much how all of them that get out do–entering other spaces not entirely built around the idea of being an incel and realzing there is more to life than the ideaology claims. There’s a popular post on tumblr from another dude who got out (it’s a reddit screenshot) because he liked his uncle’s pet micro shrimps and started trying to raise his own and ended up getting really into it and improving his life mainly in order to better support the hobby and then his world expanded, even just through the tiny lens of “I like these small animals and enjoy keeping them.”
This is entirely why the guys with legitimate hobbies tend to leave MGTOW as well: it’s VERY easy to see there being more to life than hating women if you’re into a hobby that brings you genuine joy. Sure, there are absolutely hobbyists that are misogynistic, but the core of their identity is still more based in the hobby than their misogyny. So when you’re “going your own way” and want to discuss this sweet hobby of yours and all anyone on your discussion board wants to do is whine about women instead, you’re going to seek out other pastures. Pastures which may even have women in them!
@PoM
And unfortunately that seems to be a path into pickup artistry. It used to be that incels were failed pickup artists but now it looks like the inverse. The only positive is that they’re probably less likely to go on a shooting rampage now.
I’m actually hugely in favor of this “slow exit, still using incel terms” and the like in that particular space.
He’s not talking to you. He’s talking to the lurkers in the language they understand, which gives him far more credibility – and telling them that no, they’re wrong. They don’t have to be miserably violent little shits.
Who doesn’t?
He doesn’t get a cookie from me for being a more decent person, but I’d probably buy him a beer.