It’s a word that originally did not inspire much debate or attention, despite its rapidly growing online prevalence. That is, however, until Toronto attacker suspect Alek Minassian made headlines with his assault that left 10 dead and more than a dozen others injured.
That word is ‘incel’, short for ‘involuntary celibate’, a culture that has festered in the underbellies of the internet for years. Yet even when violent crimes committed by those self-described as incels, such as Minassian’s attack or Elliot Rodger’s 2014 shooting spree that took the lives of six people, it seems very few of us in the outside world have come to examine or understand this strange and violent movement.
Last November, Reddit.com formally banned the largest incel community on their site, the r/incel subreddit. Of course, this hasn’t stopped other incel subreddits from operating on slightly tighter leashes or stopped other subreddits from taking r/incel’s place. But despite the growing prominence of incels across social media platforms, or at least despite a greater spotlight being placed on their activity and existence, you find very little direct information about incels when you give them a Google search.
What is an incel? What makes a sensible, thinking human being subscribe to the ridiculous worldview of inceldom? Most sources will give you the blunt facts: incels are (very typically) male misogynists who believe women owe them sex, and who believe they fail at finding romance only because society has abandoned them. This is the bare truth, but the inner-workings of an incel go much deeper than this. As incel communities across the internet continue to grow, picking up traction and attracting both positive and negative attention to themselves, it is pertinent to understand what makes an incel tick.
What is an incel?
Incels, involuntary celibates, are a caste of people- normally men, though some are noted to be women- who believe society is against them. They can’t find love, or sex, due to a number of reasons (supposedly) entirely beyond their control. There are several layers of inceldom, however, and most incels generally tend to startout more ‘moderate’, until eventually descending into deeper levels of paranoia, anger and violent inclinations.
Incels, depending on their extremity, may believe in a range of delusions and hold a large set of beliefs. One thing ties all incels together, however, and that is hatred. Inceldom begins with hatred. Unlike other hate-groups such as racists, whose hatred is directed solely towards another group of people, incels contain a high level of self-hatred.
An incel may begin their path merely hating only themselves, or perhaps they may initially hate others before eventually coming to hate themselves. Incels hate themselves for failing to meet what they believe are society’s strict rules for love and success.
Even ‘subcultures’ of inceldom have begun to spring up, with some incels self-labeling themselves as
“Currycels”, a term for Indian men who believe they are unable to find love because of their ethnicity. “Asiancel” is the asian-version offshoot of this sub-subculture. “Heightcels” are the men who believe they can’t find romantic attraction only because of their lack of height.
While some of an incel’s self-hatred may in part be driven by actual societal oppression they’ve faced (for instance, a ‘currycel’ may have encountered an actual instance of a woman turning him down based on his race, or an overweight incel may face legitimate issues with romance in part because of their weight) an incel is someone who has become far removed from a mere “down-on-his luck” depressed love-seeker.
Incels, true to their namesakes, believe they are involuntarily celibate. It’s simultaneously both everyone else’s fault while also their own fault. It’s society’s fault for only valuing conventional good looks. It’s society’s fault for ‘grooming’ women to be vain and shallow. It’s society’s fault for not giving them the right tools, or the right roll of the dice, to find love.
The stereotypical representation of an incel may be that of an unkempt, immature, physically unfit ‘basement dweller’ who believes all women are subhuman and should exist only for a man’s sexual pleasure. This isn’t necessarily wrong- there are certainly plenty of extreme examples of incels who legitimately believe such things. But incels come in many levels of moderation and some incels are only on the early ‘path’ to becoming more extreme.
It helps to know what an extreme incel looks like just as much as it helps to know what a budding one looks like. Warning signs for all stages of an incel can be observed, even if an individual doesn’t self-identify themselves as part of incel culture.
In short, inceldom is based in hatred. Some incels hate themselves, some incels hate society. Incels hate men that are successful (handsome, good with women; these are usually referred to as “Chads”). Incels hate women, they believe them to be vain with sinister motives (they only want money from men, they only seek social power from men, they won’t see how “good” an incel is because of that incel’s height or weight or race or appearance). It is this hatred that leads an incel to blame others for their own shortcomings. It isn’t an incel’s fault they were born ‘unfit’ for women, it isn’t an incel’s fault that their inability to better themselves has lead them to resenting themselves and others. It’s never an incel’s fault.
What makes an incel?
While some incels may start off on a quick path to extreme beliefs, many only fall into inceldom gradually and over increments. A fundamental difference between someone who is having trouble with romance and someone subscribing to incel logic is that the former will blame themselves or their circumstances in a healthy way.
They blame themselves in a way that leads to better self-understanding and hopefully self-improvement. It’s not a secret that if you’re overweight and lax on personal hygiene and appearance that you may have a harder time with romance. It’s an unhappy truth, but a truth nonetheless, that people who fall short of being conventionally attractive will have a harder time finding romance. It’s also true that some people are vain or shallow, an attractive woman may pass up a legitimate ‘nice guy’ solely because he’s unattractive. A normal, healthy person will roll with the punches, even if they may have periods of self-doubt and depression. A healthy person will work to recognize and improve their faults.
An incel is not a healthy person. The most important feature for defining an incel is someone who begins to blame anything else, or everything else, on their condition. Usually this starts off with blaming other men, as these make the easiest (and to many an incel, the most logical) targets. Other men are either jerks who don’t realize their ‘privilege’, or are outright bullies who aggressively take women away from the real ‘nice-guys’, treating the women poorly while keeping them subservient.
This is the ‘nice-guy’ stage of an incel’s development. Everyone knows the ‘nice-guy’ trope: it’s the guy who is insidiously selfish and believes women only go for dirtbags while passing up the obvious ‘nice-guy’ who would treat them right. A ‘nice-guy’ begins to idolize women in a very unhealthy way, almost seeing them as some kind of extension of their own self-inflated ego. They’re such a nice person and would treat any woman who noticed them like a queen, pampering them with all the love and affection and respect that all other men fail to give them.
This makes for a harmless, if strange and delusional, fantasy for awhile. But eventually, women become more and more objectified by the ‘nice-guy’. Women are no longer really humans in the eyes of a ‘nice-guy’, rather they’re something that a ‘nice-guy’ would be using to prove what a real ‘nice-guy’ they are if only those pesky women could stop dating the jerks.
This hatred for other men grows as their sexual and romantic frustrations fester and that hate only increases the fervent nature of their delusions.
It’s this hatred of other men that leads an incel to begin breaking down their view of women. They begin seeing women as nothing more than a ‘goal’, a goal to prove how worthy they are and a goal to give them the sexual/emotional companionship they idolize. Once women become so objectified to a ‘nice-guy’, it’s a natural conclusion that women begin to also become the object of their ire. They ask themselves how women could be so stupid to constantly not see all of their good qualities, and how women could keep going for the “Chads” and dirtbags who, supposedly, treat women so badly.
They begin believing that women are also to blame, and it’s this acceptance that opens the doors for them to start subscribing to further levels of paranoid propaganda. All women are whores who only go for hot men, until those women are in their 40s and all the ‘nice-guys’ are successful businessmen or accomplished scholars. Now these women, their youthful good looks long gone, try to go for all the wealthy and enlightened ‘nice-guys’ that they wouldn’t look at before. Incels believe they’re wise to women and their insidious, self-serving methods.
While some incels may blast immediately into the darkest levels of inceldom, many tend to start out moderately and move into deeper layers more slowly. It can commonly begin with the incel blaming circumstances or timing. They’d be able to find a girlfriend, if only it wasn’t for inconvenient timing. They’d be able to find a girlfriend, if only they’d worked up the courage to talk to a love interest when the opportunity presented itself. They may even start out by genuinely blaming themselves and their flaws. Incels start off as common people who have very common concerns and excuses.
The road to inceldom begins, however, once an individual begins blaming ulterior things for their problems- and then runs with those feelings. As stated, it’s very commonly other men that an incel will start to put blame on, eventually evolving to blaming women. Not every incel follows the exact same ‘blame structure’, but the end result is always the same.
Incels and other incels.
Incels hate themselves. They hate ‘Chads’. They hate society. They hate women. But the thing an incel just may hate the most? Other incels. It’s a strange and complex thing, but incels actively hate seeing other incels succeed. When an incel in a community ends up finding love, in the form of a girlfriend or perhaps just a casual hookup of some kind, this triggers other incels. Another incel finding success means they somehow ‘gamed the system’ or used some other unfair means to acquire success.
Maybe this incel actually improved themselves or broke out of some of their illogical beliefs. While many moderate incels would see another incel succeeding as inspiration, as an example of what they could achieve if they put the work in, deeper-rooted incels only see another’s success as even more confirmation that the world is broken.
Incel society is based in a kind of ‘we all affirm each other’ social structure. Incel communities, with the exception of only a few, are not communities for improving the habits that lead to inceldom. They are toxic echo chambers where incels complain to one another, galvanizing and promoting an escalation of their feelings. If a guy comes into an incel community to complain about how he fails to capture the attention of women, incels will not say “hey friend, perhaps you should try approaching women better, or treat them with more general respect,”. It will be “unfortunately this is reality, women are whores and you’re simply not a Chad.”.
Incels make themselves feel better by tearing down others. They want to share their suffering, and in a twisted way, inflicting it on others makes them feel safer and more right.
It’s a bit of petty human nature to like seeing others fail at things you’ve also failed at, as it reaffirms that you’re not a complete failure. With incels, however, this tiny human sin is magnified tenfold.
Due to the nature of incels interacting with other incels, incel societies are breeding grounds for extremists. When one incel says they think they’re on the verge of harming someone, perhaps sexually assaulting a woman, other incels will egg them on, reinforcing their views and urging them to continue feeling the way they do. Back in 2014, a violent extremist like mass-shooter Elliot Rodger was largely rejected even by other incels as being too ridiculous and too violent. In 2017, r/incels was banned from Reddit in part due to frequently occuring threads that were discussing or promoting violence. Violence has made itself a norm in incel culture.
Incels don’t generally want to help other incels. Incels exist as selfish beings even within their own echo chambers and communities. At a certain point, inceldom isn’t something to ‘escape’ from so much as it is something to revel in. It’s a community of self-haters, who also hate one another, who all believe they’ve found the truth. It’s an easy truth to believe in, because it absolves them of all responsibility and removes the burden of self-improvement. Incels fall into accepting that they’ll never find love or sex, but they turn that around to being a good thing. It’s a good thing they know how fake women are, it’s a good thing they can see the reality of a society that has tried to suppress them. This is the one of the deepest and most terrible forms of inceldom, because it leads to some of the culture’s most disgusting views.
What’s an incel’s perfect vision of society?
For moderate incels, their vision of a perfect society is one that can accept them with minimal effort on their part. A beautiful (never physically unattractive!) woman will fall in love with them and all of their desires will be met. Obviously incels have a vision that is a little more complex than simply that, but this is what it boils down to. They’ll get the love, sex and recognition they believe they deserve without changing anything about themselves.
More extreme incels, on the other hand, believe some pretty dark things. A growing opinion among incels is that women actually ‘age out’ of their ‘prime’ by the age of 16 or 18, and that a woman is in her ‘prime’ at the ages of 14, 15, 16, etc. Not surprisingly, even pedophiliac tendencies have made their way into the thought process of incels. These incels believe sex with teenage girls should be accepted, and that society prevents this only because women have somehow ‘made it that way’ to prevent men from enjoying women during their “sexual peak”.
Other extreme incels believe that, on a fundamental level, all women want to be raped. They believe women only concoct the image of independence as a way of ‘weeding out’ men who can’t see what they truly desire, that is, to be used as sex objects. Other extreme incels outright believe women are inferior and should be made completely subservient to men. These incels have totally abandoned the desire for love or companionship or even normal sex. They want their lifestyle: a lifestyle of sedimentary fulfillment where others take care of their needs so they can focus on video games or media or whatever else, but they also want a woman (a beautiful woman!) to fulfill their sexual urges. To these incels, women have become completely and totally objectified.
In the earlier years of the internet, dedicated communities for incels were few and far between. While many forums and chat rooms existed for those who were disgruntled with love and chasing relationships, the contributors who exhibited incel-like thoughts or behavior were quick to be ostracized. While some incel communities developed even before social media, it’s social media that has sparked a dramatic growth in a seedy, dark underculture of self-loathing individuals. Incel culture has developed and now incels spread their views far and wide, from those groan-inducing Facebook posts from an old High School classmate you used to know, to violent echo chambers in private Reddit communities. But incels do not all fit one generic description, and there are both blatant and subtle nuances to both those who are only on their way to becoming extremist incels and those who are outspoken leaders of their respective communities.
Spotting and understanding someone subscribing to incel logic is crucial, because a greater understanding on incel thought process gives one better means to assess any given incel’s potential danger. Is an incel in question a largely harmless Facebook loon, or are they an aggressive advocate of violence? If nothing else, understanding inceldom helps one more fully examine the often times confusing insanity that is the incel. As inceldom culture continues to grow and spread across the internet and their deranged voices find new social outreaches, the least one can do is try and better understand the hateful, spiteful and unusually odd men (and sometimes women) who call themselves incel.
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