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[Incels] - Still a Thing
Hexmage-PA
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If you don't know what an incel is, ContraPoints here has a good overview, analysis, and even some insights as to how certain problematic sections of the trans community mirror incel behavior (the host is herself a transwoman, for context):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0I remember hearing about pro-anorexia communities online in which anorexics (usually women) would encourage each other to remain anorexics and share "thinspiration". I had heard about incels and didn't know their deal until watching that ContraPoints video, but it sounds like they're basically the male equivalent of pro-anorexics; they're both groups of people with severe mental illnesses that instead of trying to support each other in getting better reinforce self-destructive thoughts and behaviors.
The main difference is that incels buy into a similar brand of misogyny as men who throw around terms like alpha male and beta male. However, incels are different in that they believe a person born a beta (or incel) can never become an alpha, that it is genetic destiny that no woman will ever be attracted to them and that any relationship they manage to get into will be with a woman who is just settling for them and will betray them if she can trade up for a genetically-superior man she actually finds attractive. They also believe feminists enable this behavior and will cause it to become worse.
Incels believe in several different factors that can contribute to their supposedly inevitable fate, such as having an unappealing facial bone structure, being short, being autistic, being mentally ill, or being a member of a race whose men statistically get little interest from women in general on online dating apps.
On the one hand, this misogynistic worldview should be condemned. On the other, these are men who clearly suffer from extreme self-loathing and need some kind of psychological help. Aside from lamenting how they are doomed to be losers who will never know sexual intimacy or a woman's love, they also post "suicide fuel" (or "sui fuel"), such as these examples:
Further, several incels have been so thoroughly consumed by hatred of their own supposedly-innate inferiority and the women who they believe will always reject them that they turn to violence against their supposed female oppressors.
So, what are the societal roots of the incel phenomenon, and what can be done to stop it and groups like it?
Hexmage-PA on
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Like at least the anorexics took responsibility for their "problem" no matter how unhealthy and misplaced said personal responsibility was. Incels are literally egging each other on to kill/harass other people. Reddit only banned their incel sub because they were trying to get a poster to cut the balls of their roommate because said roommate had a normal life.
There has something to be deeper than "I hate myself" to think associating with that mentality or adopting the term is okay. I hate myself on occasion, even been diagnosed with depression, but have never sunk that far. Most mentally ill people are more apt to be abused than abusive. I don't think blaming this most or half on mental illness is the right path.
Sexual attraction isn't inherently fair. Like almost all other forms of success, there are some things you can do to help yourself and a lot of factors that are beyond your control.
Like everything else in life that you might want but can't get, it's ok to be sad that people you're attracted to aren't attracted to you. But it is *incredibly unwise* to make that sadness a defining personal feature, a flag you fly, a group identity you claim, whether you direct your sadness inward or blame others. Either way, it's just a horribly bad idea. It is toxic to yourself and makes you toxic to people around you.
The inceldom phenomenon is the intersection of male entitlement and depression. Depression forces them to obsess over any part of their life that they unhappy with, male entitlement teaches them to be unhappy if they don't have literally everything they want and teaches them to see women as objects to be acquired.
There are people who wish they were smart but will never be smart. There are people who wish they were rich but will never be rich. There are just as many women who struggle with their romantic life as there are men. But incels are so deep into their entitlement and self-centeredness that they've managed to make the thing they're sad about an entire toxic movement and identity.
I wish I were more attractive to women and could attract more attractive women. I also wish I could skate fast enough to play in the Silver or Gold rec hockey leagues. I wish I had super powers. Emotionally healthy people learn to live with the difference between the best possible imaginable universe and the one they live in. Incels do not have a problem with their access to love and sex. They have a mental health issue that keeps them from accepting things they don't have, and the movement itself is poisoning them and making it much harder for them to get the actual help they need, and it's picking up a lot of collateral damage along the way. They are not the victims, they are the bullies.
Which is frankly insane, especially when you consider that the women they consistently are going after are super models and others who are incredibly gorgeous as opposed to seeking women who share common interests with them and aren't built like porn stars.
The New Yorker: The Stylish Socialist Trying to Save YouTube from Alt-Right Domination
Natalie also encourages in her video that any self-described incels who watch it should use a website-blocking tool linked in the video description to help keep them from going back to those websites.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
That requires political will, and in order to make time requires activists and politicians trying to make it a mainstream priority. Nothing going to happen as long as it gets ignored. Contrapoint's videos and articles like above are a step in that direction which is sorely needed.
How do you heal those who refused to be healed?
Lots of effort and expertise and in some cases a court order. This isn't a job for the layman
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Whole industries are based on this kind of principle.
The Contra video shows this post she found on an incel forum (at about 29:30):
Spoilered for self-harm talk:
Hopefully calling that suicide hotline was the first step in this guy getting healed.
EDIT: Also holy hell that subreddit needs to be closed before it fucks up anyone else's mind.
How exactly do you court order this? Many of these incels, excluding the really off-kilter ones, don't express views that are any different than mainstream misogynists. Women are the route of every problem, race determinism, etc. Incels took the same lessons white supremacists learned over the years. Look presentable, or at least tolerable, on the surface while slowly seducing people into your dark side. Killing the incel movement would require a realignment of society that may or may not happen. At this point I would settle for keeping them from killing more people.
This doesn't answer my question.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/7xqw3g/this-is-what-the-life-of-an-incel-looks-like
One of the individuals in the above vice article literally opted to keep shitting himself to earn internet laughs than get outside help. He then ended up killing himself. His death didn't serve as a wakeup call to anyone else interviewed in the article and you can't get a court order to force someone to get help just on the basis of coprophilia or whatever the fuck he was doing.
Think deprogramming the children is probably the only permanent option, along with recognising that you want to do things that you don't really want to do - and that you can be crazily devious in deluding yourself as to why you should do those things you know you shouldn't.
Or is it a way of not giving up? Rage and anger as a way to not just give in?
Just as harmful in the long run, but immediately enough self medication to do something?
Is it really giving up when they are actively going out to radicalize others? Encouraging young and impressionable people to end their lives and the lives of others? I see it as a cult that maybe, maybe, has depressed members as a majority.
Quarantining radicalizing social groups is a pragmatic solution and is probably easier to do than making society more responsible about mental health. If that's the way things are going to go, so be it.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Most incels will tell you they don't hate anyone but themselves. But get them together in a group and they all start talking about how they hate the world. And then a few on the tip of the spear do the violence.
It's no different in that regard from white nationalists or other violent extremist groups.
I mean giving up on relationships, by deciding that all of their worst fears about themselves and others are accurate and not worth struggling against. The allure of that is what draws people into the group. There's nothing more dangerous to a depressive person than convincing them that they're right, but also nothing more alluring to said person. The question of what drives someone to start a group like this and actively recruit others is another issue and I suspect is even darker.
I'm curious what you mean here. Do you think there's a core of misogynists who aren't depressed that are emotionally manipulating and radicalizing those who truly are depressed into attacking women?
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I'm a man so I don't know for certain, but do women shame other women who struggle sexually and romantically as much as men shame other men for the same things? Is there a female counterpart to the alpha male/beta male ideology?
Society shamed women constantly for everything. It’s how the patriarchy controls them.
But the perception of attack being pervasive, the overreaction to it, that’s the depression talking.
I think it's important to recognize that the incel worldview is fatalist but not nihilist. That is, while they would argue you can't change the system, that doesn't mean that therefore think the system is just.
Incels are indignant. Society is not as it should be, and this situation is maintained by mostly everybody but especially women. In their mind, admitting that you are considered lesser by society does not mean that you are lesser. It just means everybody else is wrong. And if I had to characterize my depression, I would say that in it it is not merely that I think society thinks I suck, it is that I agree with society. Half the battle is just being ok with your own existence, blaming society would be an improvement!
I don't doubt the community is associated with mental illness, but I don't think the self-hatred here is akin to the self-hatred you see with depression or anorexia. I see too much basic functional healthy human beings for that. They might feel isolated, but that is different from thinking you truly deserve to be isolated.
I think a much better comparison would be jihadist groups, neo-nazis and perhaps communes and cults. There seems to be a deep sense of loneliness and feeling unrecognized by society. And the appeal here is a belief system that says society is wrong.
Honestly, yes. A group of vulnerable/self-entitled people all searching for an easy target to blame all their problems on. They are every sick jackasses wet dream. The better question is why there haven't been more incel-like movements over the years.
I wonder how many unattractive women they would offer the same courtesy.
Have you seen the terminology they use in regards to women? It starts at roast beef and goes down from there. Most of them expect women to be at their best while accepting the incels at their worst and if they don't- well you know what they do.
It was closed down some time ago, but new ones keep popping up all the time. After /r/incels it was /r/braincels and then /r/truecels and who the fuck knows if that's still the current one because I'm certainly not fucking checking.
Based on the ContraPoints video, it seems they believe men and women should "stay in their league", but that women want men above their league and are pursuing them more because of online dating apps. They've got infographics and everything.
No idea who judges who's a 5 or 8 or 1 or whatever.
Probably a lot of them, video even points this out - they're not ugly or anything, just massive dickheads. They'd reject the women for being almost certain to leave them at the first sign of something better, rather than looks. And not want to take the risk (after all, they're just settling for you for now...).
There's no way to win as an Incel, that's the point.
They more or less founded our society, so we don't notice them. It's like asking where all the air is.
Personally I think social media is exacerbating problems like this by allowing toxic individuals, groups, and ideologies to develop, fester, and infect vulnerable people.
I mean, patriarchy and male entitlement are real things, but we didn't used to have men starting groups about how they believe they are born as unfuckable losers, are inherently pathetic and literally share "suicide fuel" with each other.
OK, attractiveness. I'll try to keep this on topic, because we're treading into more generic dating discussion, but here we go:
People have kind of a squeamishness about trying to quantify these things or describe dating in those terms, because it brings to mind creepy dudes rating women on the 1-10 scale of hotness. But when real social scientists do real work, they can and do quantify things. It's not hard to bring in a group of people to rate photos or measure how many messages an online dating profile gets.
What they find is that dating does work like a more or less efficient market. We have a certain level of attractiveness (and I mean ability to attract partners, which can mean looks, social skills, life success and a whole bunch of other factors) that we bring to the table, and we tend to pair off with people of about the same level. It's called the matching hypothesis. We may have preferences for certain types within our level, but we're still going to end up with someone on our level.
The incel movement feeds on male entitlement that has trouble accepting its own level for two reasons:
1) Society telling them that they can have whatever they want, and what they want is women way more attractive than they can warrant
2) They very rarely value female input or opinion, so they assume women see attractiveness the same way they do. Relatively speaking, for heterosexuals in our culture, male attraction to females tends to be *way* heavier focused on pure physical attraction (hell, mostly just not being overweight), whereas female attraction tends to be more multifaceted. Looks are still *one* factor, and an important one, but so are life success and social skills and confidence and a bunch of other stuff. Incels especially tend to brush right past this because they don't value women as people who have a valid point of view, and obsess over the idea that they themselves must be "ugly" instead of looking at the broader state of their lives.
So what you have is entitled men who think they should be entering into relationships (although that's probably pretty euphemistic way of putting what they want out of women) with women who are quite simply out of their league.
Incel culture feeds on the men who simply don't want to accept that by giving them an alternate, convoluted hypothesis: It's not that you're a 3 who wants a 7. You're actually a 7, but the market is rigged against you and those dumb 7 women are all pining for 9s instead of giving you what you are rightfully owed.
I would say most conspiracy theorists and self-defeating racists are the same way. They constantly share how X group is getting one over them or Y group is keeping them down. It's not my fault I didn't get accepted to that college. Person of Z group took my spot! They're all conspiring against me! Let me crawl into the deepest depths of the alt-right to have my evil ideas borne from a bruised ego supported.
1) we've destroyed a castle with no foundation
2) men used to keep things bottled up inside
3) it's always been this way; social media just makes everything hypertransparent
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Like the alt-right or the nazis or the like, there's a lot of people connecting with others and getting to share and really steep themselves in ideologies that they might previously have had to keep under wraps and to themselves.
Incels are a group based around thoughts a ton of men have had at one time or another and that we've seen expressed all over the place before (see - ladder theory for the most obvious example) but now they can all hang out together and commiserate over the issue and egg each other on into more and more extreme places and suck new recruits in who start off just nibbling around the edges looking for someone who is willing to acknowledge how they feel.
This doesn't seem to be in line with what the ContraPoints video and the Vice article portrayed. Looks are one factor, but they also claim mental illness as a possible fatal flaw. The dude in the Vice article at one point makes a comment that some of the men who think they are too ugly are actually "too autistic". The guy also seems very aware of how crippling his mental issues are.
Also, personally, I'd think the fact women grade on things like confidence would make it even more intimidating for them, since then they aren't just rejecting you because of your looks, but on who they are as a person.
I'm sorry, but when you've got things like the post included near the end of that ContraPoints video where the guy is talking about how he's mentally unwell and dialing a suicide hotline, the people posting "suicide fuel", and the fact that the man in that Vice article claims that four of his friends have committed suicide and that he contemplates suicide too I think some sympathy is owed (though what they are driven to do by these feelings shouldn't be excused). Something is emotionally and mentally fucking up people like them severely, and writing it off as male entitlement sounds like an excuse to say "fuck 'em, good riddance" instead of doing something to prevent people from getting to that point.
I think that's the interpretation you were fishing for and the response you wanted to make when you started this thread.
In this particular post, I wasn't describing why they turned to the incel movement, I was talking about where the chart you posted and ideas about hypergamy come from within incel culture.
But sure, I'll play along. What you have is mentally ill people who are emotionally abusive to those around them. I can simultaneously feel sympathy for their pain and also identify their abusive behavior as what it is. "If you don't play along with our suicide threats, you're writing us off and saying fuck us good riddance" is emotionally abusive behavior, and that's how incels use it.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.