The How, What and Why of the Incel Community
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It’s 1:45pm on a cold Monday afternoon. I’m hunched over my laptop listening to a man on Discord patiently combing through the contents of a Word document I’d forwarded to him earlier, reading its wording aloud and reacting to what he’s narrated. The document’s contents: a 10-page collection of online comments made by the general public, mainly about him but also about the mostly-online co-culture that he counts himself as part of. The community is that of the incel, meaning ‘involuntary celibate’. The man: Joey, a 24-year-old member of said community. Joey works his way through the somewhat polarising opinions, lamentations and mockeries that strangers on the internet have expressed at the community’s unceasing presence, along with comments about his own general personality and physical appearance. One remark, taken from an anti-incel Facebook page, lovingly named “Incels Say The Darndest Things” (or “ISTDT”), says: ‘Just confirms what I already thought. It’s got nothing to do with your appearance and everything to do with your entitled fuckboy attitude.’ Joey lets out a breathy laugh peppered with condescension in reaction to this fairly tame put-down. Comments like this were posted on Facebook and YouTube, sites where, in August of 2018, Vice News published a 6-minute long video containing segments of an interview that Elle Reeve conducted with the aforementioned Joey, as well as a separate article entitled “This is what the life of an incel looks like”. The article and video explored, to a limited extent, the phenomenon of how the incel community came to be, the theories and beliefs of its members, and just some of the incidents of violence that are now synonymous with the community, focusing mainly on the Isla Vista incident perpetrated by Elliot Rodger on 23rd May 2014, which resulted in the deaths of 6 people in California, and the Toronto van attack on 23rd April 2018, committed by Alek Minassian, who pledged support for Rodger, aka ‘the supreme gentleman’, on a Facebook post prior to ploughing a van through crowds of people in a busy business district, killing 10.
Opinions left by viewers of Vice’s video are divisive, to say the very least: some people display commiserations and understanding for Joey’s plight (‘I just feel bad for them, for all them. The absence of any love or warmth in your life is bad enough, but imposing that condition, oftentimes unknowingly on yourself is even worse. It’s a literal cult of self-loathing.’); others are not so sympathetic (‘What a bunch of weirdos, at least they’re doing the right thing and killing themselves.’). In spite of some comments like the latter being scathing and downright apathetic in the face of the perceived hardships that incels deal with, Joey was nonplussed. ‘That’s like something an incel would post, so, I’m not offended by that. They were great souls. That’s the thing: [viewers] think that [the people in the Vice video] are all incels. The guy in the video that killed himself didn’t identify as an incel; he had cerebral palsy so that’s why he killed himself. He wasn’t incel.’ Joey continues combing through the collection of remarks: ‘Boohoo, no one wants your dick.’ His response to these often flippant insults gradually becomes filled with exasperation. ‘Once again, I didn’t try to come off as whiny, and I wasn’t crying for myself…I was trying to fight for incels as a people. There are people out there who aren’t having sex, who are perfectly nice, and who are perfectly nice people, and it’s kind of just a tragedy that they don’t have sex, because not all of them…well, not all of them, a lot of them blame women but not all of them.’ Here we begin to factor in one of the facets that the general public instantly think of when they hear the term ‘incel’: blaming women for perceived sexual and social rejection.
Over the course of several months, with Joey’s assistance, I researched and explored possible theories to explain how the incel community came to fruition, and its growth in influence in the years since the 2014 Isla Vista attack. I also spoke briefly with Cory D Taylor, a former moderator for the aforementioned anti-incel page “ISTDT”, and Ryan*, a former incel. The process of putting this article together has almost become a sort of time-capsule of a very specific point in time in what is collectively known as the ‘manosphere’. Since August 2018, when Vice released their original article, various reddit message boards (‘subreddits’) associated with inceldom, including r/ChadRight, r/MDE (Million Dollar Extreme) and r/Braincels, which currently acts as a replacement for r/incel after its termination in November 2017, were either shut down or placed under quarantine by reddit’s administrative team due to what was perceived as a ‘high degree of misogyny’ present on them; on October 1st, the controversial misogynistic pick-up-artist blog Return of Kings was put on indefinite hiatus after its owner Daryush ‘Roosh V’ Valizadeh announced revenue losses; the incel message board known as incels.me suffered a DDoS attack in mid-October, forcing its administrators to redirect the site through incels.is and eventually through incels.co; on 2nd November, Scott Paul Beierle, a member of the incel community, entered the Tallahassee Hot Yoga studio in Florida, shot and killed six women, and pistol-whipped one man before turning the gun on himself; more recently in January of this year, a Denver man named Christopher Wayne Cleary was arrested in Utah for posting a threat to murder ‘as many girls as I see’ on his Facebook page; in mid-June, a new forum for Asian incels was established named asiancels.net, which was banned shortly after; and in that same month, dozens of pro- and anti-incel groups were shut down by Facebook, including “ISTDT”. Cleary’s online ramblings echo many of the complaints that incels have expressed about sexual frustration, social rejection and what’s seen by many outside of the community as an overarching sense of entitlement.
Many people may not initially realise that the term ‘incel’ itself was coined originally in 1997 by a Canadian college student known only by her first name, Alana, when she created a website and mailing list, titled “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”, detailing her sexual inactivity. She abbreviated the mailing list name to “INVCEL”, later shortening it further to “incel”. Over time the word itself has become completely divorced from its original intent, associated with what many brand as a ‘violent and misogynistic hate group’, and is also beginning to bleed its way into the lexicon of controversial ‘celebrities’ such as Graham Linehan and Bill Maher, who have both very recently begun to use the term as a misattributed slur for anyone who expresses even the mildest of disagreements with their uninformed personal opinions.
As for the actual origins of how the community itself came to be, the reasons why so many men across several continents came to the beliefs that have become synonymous with it, appears to be a mystery to many, which resulted in my positing 3 hypotheses to both Joey and Cory during my time speaking to both. One theory I suggested to them was that the incel movement came about as a frustrated reaction to being trapped in the middle ground between perpetuated toxic masculinity and the current barrage of societal ‘positivity’ movements like body positivity and mental health positivity, the frustration stemming from one’s inability to insert oneself into either group. Cory seemed to broadly agree on this as a possible origin. ‘I believe that there’s a lot of confusion and lack of identity among the incel community, that when they’re trying to find something to identify with, it’s hard for them to find that elsewhere.’ Joey also felt that this was a possibility, but related it more to an unintended side-effect of an encroaching 3rd wave feminist movement: ‘The mental health and the body positivity [movements] are for women more so than for men, so obviously they don’t have a place in that. The toxic masculinity part? [Incels] want to be more masculine, I think. [Incels] refer to the world as being ‘gynocentric’; that’s a term we use a lot, and we see it very differently, because feminists see the world as ‘everything’s for a man’, and you have some statistical evidence for that. But, men, especially young men, say ‘the world is for women now’, and it’s already changing. Incels see the world as a woman’s world now, and there is statistical evidence for that as well. There’s statistical evidence that men have always been killing themselves at a higher rate. Men are killing themselves with drugs all the time now. Every crime is more likely to happen to you in America, except for sexual assault, to a man. Men die earlier, men die more at work, more men are homeless, and more men are in poverty.’
A second possibility I suggested was that the growing trend of inceldom is an unforeseen after-effect of the Baby Boomer Generation, specifically as a result of components like participation trophies, instant gratification and other perceptions of entitlement. This is where both Cory’s and Joey’s opinions began to diverge slightly, with Joey categorising many more movements as being the fault of Baby Boomers, and Cory shifting his focus to the proliferation of constantly-changing media formats and the growth of social media. ‘Because of the way that [incels are] looking at this, and the way that they’re seeing this as a kind of hyper-misogynistic form of entitlement, I wouldn’t necessarily pin it entirely on the Baby Boomers’, Cory acknowledged. ‘I would say that this kind of thinking has occurred throughout Western history, and the reason it’s becoming more pronounced, more forming in these groups right now, is because of the ease of communication that we have today. These people that maybe would’ve had these thoughts, but not been able to find other people with these thoughts, are now able to do so through the internet.’ Joey expanded on this theory a bit further to include other modern social mobilizations: ‘This is the cause of ALL these movements. This is the cause of the ‘alt-right’, this is the cause of the identity politics movements, the Black Lives Matter movement. This is the cause of 3rd wave feminism, and the cause of inceldom. This is at the heart of it all, and this is what has left everyone so sensitive and so obsessed with this ‘compassion/harm’ axiom of morality, and about being just a victim. A renowned sociologist who’s not an incel or anything, he’s a centre-liberal sociologist, named Jonathan Haidt talks a lot about this. He just wrote a book about it actually about how, essentially, your feelings are anti-fragile, meaning that it’s just like your immune system. You need to be exposed to opposing, and even offensive, opinions because you’ll come back stronger from them, but because kids their whole lives are told ‘they’re great, this, that, the other’, when they go to college, then all of a sudden just the slightest offence or micro-aggression sends them into hysterics, so I agree that that has a lot to do with the problem.’
The final theory was that its materialization is the result of a perfect storm of the aforementioned causes, coupled with rising cases of body dysmorphic disorder, the growth of 3rd wave feminism, rise in so-called ‘PC culture’, growing culture of entitlement, crackdown on toxic masculinity, apparent sexual liberation, and social media’s growing obsessions with appearance, status and wealth. ‘It is a culmination of all those’, insisted Joey. ‘I can try to add some here. One is the rise of autism [diagnoses]. I think a lot of it has to do with consumerism and commodity, and a lot of autists I talk to are smart guys, and they deserve better lives, and I wish they could get them. [Modern society has] destroyed monogamy, pretty much. Divorce rates are huge, super high. Single fathers, single parenthood is up way high here [in the US]. Kids are going to school earlier and earlier, which is all shown to be bad, through years of clinical literature from psychology.’ Cory once again related it more to the proliferation of social media: ‘As we’re entering into another era of social movement with acceptance and this type of thing, you’re gonna see pushback to any major social movement, and I think that there’s a case to be made that this is the -I wouldn’t say the ‘logical’ reaction to any of this because it’s not- but it’s very much the kind of thing that you saw with people becoming upset here in the United States during the Civil Rights era, and during the Women’s Liberation movement in the 1960’s and that kind of thing. So it’s sadly expected that there will be some pushback when there is social change. However, in this case, it is a result of all of that coming together with the new media available, with social networking and that sort of thing. I don’t think it would’ve been as coherent and coalesced without that, but I also don’t know if we would actually have the type of social movements we do without social media and the internet either.’
Even with those possible hypotheses to explain the incel community’s genesis, the broader view among many members of the incel community is that their involuntary celibacy is caused entirely by the rise of 3rd wave feminism and the apparent increase in ‘leftism’ in modern society. Almost from the beginning of my contact with Joey, he was adamant to reiterate this line of thinking: that feminism, and the fear of social ostracism that comes with criticizing feminism, is to blame for many men’s inceldom. ‘Basically criticizing women is pretty much socially taboo, so we have to do it in these echo chambers. We have to talk about it, and then it grows and gets worse, but if it was more socially acceptable to be anti-feminist, or to be a reasonable anti-feminist and say ‘hey, these are my complaints’, then you wouldn’t have people forming these echo chambers, I don’t think, because containment doesn’t even work anyway, it’s just gonna spill back over. Containment doesn’t work at all.’ One comment left on a posting of the Vice video suggested that ‘sex is only a small component of this’, which Joey agreed with. ‘Incels misdiagnose their own problem when they say it’s about sex. It’s not about sex; it’s about love, and it’s about wanting a relationship and being able to breed. I mean, imagine living with the thought of ‘no girl will ever want me, I’ll never be able to have a kid. My life dies with me’. I mean, it’s a rather sad thing. I think that drives people a little bit crazy when they get into thinking like that.’ The inalienable view across the community is that incels are the product of a feminine society, that modern feminism and identity politics have destroyed the nuclear family, and that being an incel could be seen by some as a form of rebellion against an encroaching predominantly feminist civilization. The main problem with this viewpoint is that many detractors have already framed it in a fascist bent, and observe a certain level of bleed-over to the rising alt-right. Ryan, who backed out of the community shortly after the Toronto van attack in April 2018, felt that tying the community with fascists was a fair comparison: ‘I think that it’s a very sexist and racist community and I think that such forums are dangerous, since there have been several incel attacks that can be traced back to such forums, and that they can often radicalize vulnerable men like they did to me.’ Cory echoed some aspects of this viewpoint: ‘One of the issues that I personally believe we’re having in society right now is this desire to paint anyone who believes in the ideals of any community as believing in the worst ideals of that community. We do not have the point now, and I don’t think we ever will, where every single person who declares themselves as an incel is going to commit violent acts, or even going to commit suicide or anything like that. But what we do have is we have the radicalization within that community where some people will. When you’re putting together groups like this, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that there’s a lot of similarity between the way that ISIS has recruited and radicalized people, and the way that incels have as well, utilizing the internet and this type of thing. You’re not gonna see every single person go and become the worst of it, but you will see the people who do that be praised within that community, and there is a kind of a worship of violence, a worship of death that comes out of the incel community, and I think that’s the most dangerous aspect to it. As long as that continues, sadly we are gonna keep having them as a threat to us.’
Even with the co-culture’s origin being slightly murky, the core ideologies of the community are fairly well solidified, and need to be closely observed. On incel-centric discussion boards such as r/Braincels (which, as of 13th June 2019, has 49,064 subscribers, but due to its reddit quarantine is currently displayed as having 0 subscribers) and incels.co (which at the time of publication stood at 10,052 members), most discussions among community members are divided between factors that they feel are the direct result of their inceldom, and flimsy ways to improve themselves outwardly in order to attract women. Discussions about ‘chads’ and ‘staceys’ are commonplace, those being the catch-all names among members to refer to men and women who are attractive and sexually active. Both are usually spoken about in disdain. Sexism and misogyny play a large part of the discourse. Members often post their disdain for females (changed to ‘femoids’ or ‘foids’) due to their not being attracted to them. Despite the seeming hatred directed at women, there is still a longing there for relationships, dates and the simple, normal interactions that many incels feel they cannot have, ones only reserved for the so-called beautiful people. There is still the desire to ‘ascend’, essentially graduating from being an incel to a ‘normie’, maybe even becoming a ‘chad’. ‘There’s a massive group of people who aren’t having sex, and it just feels like you’re the dude left out of the orgy, and left out of the fun,’ Joey explained, once the subject of relationships came up in our conversation. ‘You’re missing key steps in your ‘relationship romantic development’, y’know? Kiss a girl before the age of 15, and then have sex by the time you’re 18. Relationships, you’re supposed to have these things. A lot of incels missed all that. Me, 24 years old, never really had a relationship, never really had a girlfriend.’
“Looksmaxing” is quite a common subject; it refers to attempts by community members to enhance their physical appearance in order to attract someone, usually by methods such as dressing in expensive clothing (something which Elliot Rodger discussed ad nauseum in his manifesto), going to the gym (known as “gymmaxing”), doing various exercises to make their necks thicker, or undergoing expensive, and often severe, plastic surgery procedures, including jaw augmentations, clavicle lengthening, wrist surgery, canthal tilt surgery, and leg-lengthening operations. Joey told me that he’s against plastic surgery as a ‘cope’ unless it’s in extreme circumstances. ‘There’s small studies that say that wrist size or neck size matters, and it does to an extent, [but] I think it’s relatively useless. I know a dude who did neck training and chewed Falim gum, which is like this gum that makes your jawline sharper, it’s fucking hard as shit. He did a few looksmax things. Now he’s able to get girls on Tinder. He said it’s not because of the looksmax stuff, he said ‘I just changed my attitude’, but it’s not like his personality is showing much through Tinder. He just looksmaxed.’ Obsession with looks, and a prevalence of body dysmorphia is quite high among the community, but people responding on various boards can often be observed making somewhat fruitless efforts to build up each other’s confidence in their appearance. Should an incel post a selfie asking for advice on how they should ‘looksmax’, they will receive a small number of suggestions for different cosmetic operations and exercises they can do, but will also receive numerous compliments from other community members; most often the phrase used is ‘mogs me’. ‘Mogging’ as defined by a member of the anti-incel subreddit r/justneckbeardthings, means ‘to be dominated into submission by another male’s aesthetics, one can be heightmogged by a tall chad, facemogged by an attractive chad, framemogged by a muscular chad, etc.’ Early on in our correspondence, Joey sent me links to various scientific studies and YouTube videos that back up the community’s assertion that their looks are among the primary causes as to why so many incels are still struggling to find a date. ‘The fact is looks matter. It’s just a sad reality that some people will never pair bond and that number is growing for men.’
Community members are referred to by the subgroup they’re in, which depends on the reason(s), attributed either by themselves or by fellow community members, as to why they’re involuntarily celibate in the first place. For example, the perception that’s generally accepted across the community is that Asian men will have a much more difficult time attracting a potential date or girlfriend, generally due to such established and extremely racist viewpoints in Western society that Asian men are generally shorter in height or have smaller penises than Caucasian men. This will be seen as the reason why an Asian incel is struggling to find a date, and he comes to be referred to as a ‘ricecel’. There are also currycels (Indian incels), heightcels (men who are perpetually single due to their height), mentalcels (singledom exacerbated by poor mental health), NEETcels (being single due to their Not being in Education, Employment or Training), mayocels (Caucasian incels), ethnicels (incels of an ethnic minority), wristcels (incels that believe they are single due to having small wrists), oldcels (incels over the age of 30), volcels (being voluntarily celibate), femcels (female incels, but their very existence is heavily debated among community members); the list of subgroups is seemingly non-exhaustive.
In the midst of the ostensible self-hatred and quite often vitriolic anger at ‘foids’, the boards are almost always peppered with sometimes gentle but often abrasive humour, as a coping mechanism among members. Memes mocking women, themselves, each other, members of the rival anti-incel subreddit r/IncelTears, and modern society as whole are a staple on r/Braincels. Even with a smattering of members still routinely posting hateful diatribes and threats of violent acts on their numerous message boards, it appears outwardly that more members have pushed in recent months and years to disassociate the community from the violence that it has become synonymous with. Elliot Rodger does not get mentioned very often. Other well-publicised incels such as Minassian and Beierle are almost never talked about; it’s almost as if they never existed.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned criticisms about women that pop up on these boards are usually the posts that get signal-boosted more than anything else by anti-incel groups and discussion boards. Cory, who regularly moderates such posts on “ISTDT”, feels that this is a natural occurrence when viewing groups that people tend to be opposed to. ‘Much in the same way that any group trying to bring light to an issue is going to look at some of the more awful aspects of the thing that they’re fighting against, a lot of that also has to do with the pushback that many of our group members get in their personal lives and in other groups where people try to downplay the worst aspects of incels as well. We definitely are not saying at all that every single person who is an incel believes in every single one of these things, in any way, shape or form. But they do all share the trait of misogyny and of toxic masculinity with that.’ When I mentioned groups like “ISTDT” and r/IncelTears (which, at the time of publication, had a staggering 305,836 subscribers) to Ryan, he was broadly supportive of their goals: ‘I think they are a good thing, not just to help warn people about the hateful things that incels say, but also to help people who might be vulnerable to becoming incels, like I was, to see that they don’t want to be associated with that community, and to help them find healthy ways to deal with their problems instead.’
An interesting factor of the incel community, when compared to other protest groups and communities that have grown in numbers over the past decade is that there is a remarkable lack of a physical presence of the incel community. There have been no notable public meetings, no protests, no marches to speak of. ‘I think protests would be bad’, Joey stated. ‘I think that that’s a weapon of the left; that’s just a leftist tactic is to protest, and we can’t win a battle of protesting. There’ll be a big protest and no matter what happens, if any violence breaks out it’ll be blamed on incels, and I don’t want that at all.’ An important factor of note is that the community itself is staggeringly small; so small, in fact, that when Vice’s article was published last year, many members on incels.co became confused and angry at Joey’s participation in the piece, simply because most of them had never personally heard of him or spoken to him before, with many of its members insinuating that he was an actor hired by Vice who was merely reading scripted content. The previous ways in which the incel community has been portrayed by the wider media up to this point in time has made it incredibly difficult for those of the unenlightened populace to have any proper grasp on the true size of the community, or on the prominent issues that incels are troubled by. Even the representation of the community in a recent episode of “Law & Order: SVU” did nothing to quell the already overzealous animosity against the community internationally, only seeking to perpetuate the depiction of incels as aggressive, entitled, banal, socially inept and unreasonably dangerous. The rhetoric of the co-culture that’s largely sold is also a broken record: misogyny, terrorism, and generally misdirected hatred. Physically, Joey was not what people pictured when they heard the word ‘incel’; people typically had in their minds the image of a neck-bearded, overly obese, bespectacled, slovenly and unfit man surrounded by empty junk food packets, pristine anime comics and broken PC parts. Joey’s very appearance in Vice’s 2018 article challenged this current, oft-parodied depiction, as reflected in people’s comments, with many saying that he was good-looking and could possibly get a girlfriend if he would ‘just go outside’. What was particularly of interest was that during our time talking before our interview proper, Joey mentioned to me that Vice made every attempt to cherry-pick his most inflammatory comments from his time with them, and bolstered those in place of more nuanced points that he had mostly stuck with during the 3 hours he spoke with them, he feels, seemingly in an effort to maintain the already pervasive narrative, and to prevent people from thinking too much on the issues of inceldom. ‘I said [to Elle Reeve] after that interview, “I don’t think it moves the dialectic any further. I don’t think it moves the argument, or answers any questions for anyone. It doesn’t change anyone’s views on incels; it just kind of explains the life of a single incel.” We did talk a lot about my beliefs and what I think is reasonable and unreasonable; all that missed the cut.’
Further exploring comments left in response to Joey’s participation in Vice’s article, many people take an ill-informed view on what can be done to ‘fix’ the problem of inceldom, with dozens of commentators simply saying ‘this is what prostitutes are for’, ‘take a shower’, ‘just use Tinder’, or the phrase too often flung around, the bane of every incel’s supposed struggle: ‘just be yourself!’ Suggestions like these are only meagre attempts at scratching the surface of the issue in Joey’s eyes, particularly when prostitution is put forward as a viable suggestion. ‘The most crazy incel I know, the guy who most rang true to Elliot Rodger’s attitude, had fucked prostitutes all the time. [Most incels] are probably guys who’ve never had sex with prostitutes, and once they do, they’ll realise that’s not what they wanted. [They’ll say] “I still feel like shit. I feel even more like shit now, because I wanted to love a girl and I want a girl to love me and I want foundation”.’ There’s also the issue of pick-up artistry, an industry that has made millions of dollars off the efforts of community members to ‘be themselves’ in order to find a relationship, resulting in the establishment of the site ‘PUAhate.com’, on which Elliot Rodger regularly posted. The site was shut down just one day after the Isla Vista killings, but other sites like incels.co and sluthate.com have taken its place in the years since its shut-down. ‘[Pick-up artists are] idiots’, Joey confided. ‘They’re just frauds, and they’re actual misogynists. Some of their techniques actually probably do work for some people who are good-looking or normal enough, but they don’t work for people who are ugly or autistic, or are actually socially inept. It’s just a bunch of bullshit they sell. Pick-up artists are scumbags.’ Dating sites have also proven to be a fruitless endeavour; in May of 2018 a dating site exclusively for incels, inventively named “DateAnIncel”, was launched, seeking to connect incels with any woman willing to date them. DateAnIncel’s Twitter account has not been active in any meaningful way since 1st June 2018, when the account was riding a wave of publicity on the back of the website’s launch. It has no Facebook presence, and there’s no clear method of contacting the website’s administrators. Joey agreed with the suspicions held by much of the incel community about DateAnIncel.com, in that it appeared to be either a money-making scam, or an effort by a detractor or anti-incel group to dox potential applicants: ‘[Dating sites] are ineffective because nobody wants to date an incel.’ On 9th September 2018, DateAnIncel.com’s SquareSpace account expired. There has been no indication that the site will be renewed, and DateAnIncel’s Twitter account have not responded to queries on how many applications it received, or whether or not the site will be restored.
Many people may not consciously notice, but there is a pervasive attitude towards virgins that has permeated its way through media such as TV and movies, one that suggests that a woman who is a virgin past a certain age is to be celebrated in some way, or often seen in a somewhat whimsical light. Men who are virgins, on the other hand, are openly jeered and mocked, no matter their age, even if they’re too young to legally be sexually active. Women who are virgins are predominantly thought of as ‘pure’; men who are virgins are usually portrayed as ‘pathetic’. Insidious attitudes like this towards virginity have wormed their way into people’s psyches, to the point that members of the incel community who have yet to lose their virginity are commonly viewed by detractors as being weird, disgusting and inadequate. Very often, critics of inceldom will routinely draw attention to the pervasive line of thinking in the community that suggests that women who have had multiple sexual partners should be shunned by society for promiscuity, usually retorting to this frame of mind that it should not matter how many sexual partners a person has had. The immediate hypocrisy in this line of thinking is that, from sheer observation of anti-incel boards and subreddits, these same critics can also be seen lambasting and denigrating incels for their lack of sexual activity. ‘A lot of men feel bad and feel shamed for being virgins, and then people like the feminists say ‘no, we don’t shame men for being virgins’, Joey asserted. ‘But a lot of them do. A lot of them find men who are virgins to be creepy. They assume that they’re virgins for bad reasons, and they think they’re creepy. I’ve heard stories of guys saying to girls ‘hey, I’m a virgin’, to the point where they’re laying down in bed with the girl, and they say they’re a virgin, and the girl gets up and leaves. That’s got to be soul-destroying.’
Both schools of thought on this factor of inceldom have been irreparably damaged by the media’s persistent and ubiquitous portrayal of the pitiful and loathsome male virgin. Ryan sympathised with this rationale: ‘I do think that this is a prevailing trope in the media and I do think that it contributes to the toxic ideas of incels. I think that we as a society need to change the way we talk about sexuality and especially the way it is portrayed in the media, or I fear that such resentments will inevitably arise. It will take a lot of time and a lot of people to get involved to make such a large societal change but I definitely think it’s one that should be done.’
There was an alternative subreddit that existed, tied loosely to r/Braincels. The board was called r/IncelGraveyard. Established in June of last year, it was filled with suicide notes from incels who had lost any and all possible hope of ‘ascending’ and had either logged off leaving the world of inceldom behind, or had tragically chosen to take their own lives. It’s almost impossible to know how many members of the community who have posted suicide notes actually followed through with committing suicide. Considering the high amount of poor mental health inherent among incels, there’s also a prevalence of suicidal ideation, a factor that is cruelly sneered at by critics, who can often be observed egging members on to take their own lives. Joey confided that, in a co-culture that has such a small physical presence, the line tends to blur when dealing with the people who claim they will end their own lives, and those who are simply saying so in jest: ‘People say ‘I’m gonna kill myself’, and then log out and never log back in, and you don’t know. Then sometimes they come back a year later. I joke around like that; I tell my chatroom every night ‘I’m gonna kill myself for real this time. You’ll hate yourselves for pushing me to this, guys’, and then I just log out. Then the next morning I log back in like ‘I tried to kill myself again last night. I failed though!’’ Joey took this opportunity in our discussion to relate his own experience of previously attempting suicide: ‘Personally, from formerly being suicidal, and from having tried to kill myself several times and being hospitalized for it and shit like that, I always have this joke; I say “I’d kill myself, guys, but I wouldn’t be able to bask in, like, post-death sympathy.” That’s like the joke, y’know: you’d kill yourself, but you don’t get to see the image of everyone saying “oh I shouldn’t have told him to kill himself!”’ On 28th February 2019, like many other dedicated incel message boards, r/IncelGraveyard was banned by reddit; no plausible reason was provided for the banning. Out of respect, an individual reddit account was set up soon after by an anonymous user who has now taken charge of cataloguing the many suicide notes frequently posted on r/Braincels.
Looking at possible solutions to what issues incels have posited as reasons why they are incels in the first place is not as straightforward as one would assume. Joey sought a greater focus on mental health, but also urged a reversal as far as societal changes go: ‘I guess a more masculine, stoic and, even perhaps, patriarchal you could say, society. Just with little things, not moving the clock back 50 years, moving it just back a few years, before all this identity politics bullshit…I mean, what has all this feminism done? Has it lowered rape rates or anything? I don’t know. If it has, then that’s a good thing and we’d like to keep things that way, but I still think that we could have lower rape rates and also not have this inceldom thing, which is, I think an even worse problem…and then, also, there has to be a whole change with how mental illness is addressed, and how psychology addresses mental illness. I think psychology needs to be reformed in a way in order to treat this, because psychology just continues to push the ‘oppressor/oppressee’, ‘compassion/harm’ narrative.’ Cory echoed this need for a greater push for mental health awareness and analysis behind the community itself: ‘I don’t believe that treating it as a death cult and waiting for it to die is a real solution because it is recruiting and growing. There’s more people entering into it than are leaving it at the moment from what we’ve seen, and I do believe there also needs to be further study into that and real demographic information done, but I think that the broader solution is to have a more active conversation in society about the role of masculinity, the role of how men relate to women especially, and what can be done with that, and then to get past some of the stigmas as well, of things that they see as negative about themselves. There is massive physical insecurity in a lot of incels too and there is a lot of body dysmorphia, and there are a lot of issues with imagined fears and imagined insecurities.’ Ryan related change more to an overall improvement in society: ‘I can’t really say what exactly the solution would be, but I do know that individually it would involve therapy and efforts on the part of members of the incel community to break free from that mind-set. As a society, we would need to combat toxic masculinity and promote tolerance and feminism as well as change in how we talk about sexuality in the media.’
Combatting the perception of the incel community outwardly as a woman haters’ club is also a consideration. Joey outlined possible ways to internally buck this stereotype: ‘[It would involve] reforming the movement, or changing it, or changing certain tactics. But I don’t see that happening very soon. I think maybe it’s over for inceldom, and a new movement will come about. Because it’s not just lack of sex that’s the problem; it’s a whole generation of kids like me who can’t break into society. It’s not just totally about sex. It’s about mental health, it’s about sex, it’s about relationships, it’s about having a social life, it’s about being low-status, being ugly, being autistic; all that stuff.’
With these suggestions in mind, one stand-out response to Vice’s YouTube upload of their interview with Joey seemed to show the highest amount of understanding and sympathy for him and others like him, outlining possible oft-overlooked solutions. I chose to finish my interviews with Joey, Cory and Ryan by asking their opinions on this comment:
‘People are saying these guys should “just get help”, but you’re missing an important component to that plan: real social pressure that these guys care about. They have no immediate social circle that wants to see them succeed (or threatens to cut ties should they not make the effort), so there’s no one to push them into that terrible territory that is going through therapy. So none of them will do it. They can’t see the benefit to doing so (since they believe their status in the social hierarchy is the result of something like a biological determinism), and they have no examples in their social circles — primary, secondary or even tertiary — to show them that dealing with your problems in an empirical and productive way actually works. So they don’t. They just learn to deal with the pain (like the guy in the video) or they give up entirely and commit suicide or, rarely, take their anger out on other people. Videos like [the Vice video] don’t help. They frame the problem the wrong way; the anger on women is a smoke screen for the real problem, which is a complete lack of ability to connect emotionally with anyone who isn’t basically exactly like them. Why the focus on women? Because you’re truly an “adult” when you’re grown up, and in a stable relationship with a woman. It seems that, to them, if they could simply find a partner, their problems would be solved in an instant. What they fail to realise — or have perhaps already realised, but have repressed deeply — is that the correct order is the exact opposite. Nothing will change until the public discourse changes from “incels are angry terrorist losers who hate women” to “incels are angry, mentally unwell young men without a social support network and no real hope of fitting in with the world, which is all they really want”.’
Cory used this comment as an opportunity to hammer home some of what he feels are the core fundamentals of “ISTDT”: ‘The biggest thing that I’d like is to reiterate the point that we don’t believe that anyone else has to die, and everyone who is against the incels, among the community of moderators and administrators and things at “Incels Say the Darndest Things”, we would love if tomorrow this wasn’t an issue. The world does not have to be as bleak as incels make it out to be, and it isn’t, in our opinion.’ The comment did strike a chord with Joey, with the final sentence in particular hitting home: the idea of being able to fit in, to have a social support network, something that many of the rest of us take absolutely for granted. ‘We do have some social circles that are keeping us up online, we don’t have any real life ones…we have already seen it happening in Japan with the hikikomoris, where something like 10% of people, aged 18–35, are hikikomoris, meaning they’re basically agoraphobic. It basically means ‘never leave your place’. Men are dropping out of society. There is…there’s nothing for them.’
At his request, Ryan’s name has been altered to protect his identity.
- Update: On 30th September 2019, r/Braincels was banned by reddit.
Thanks to Cory D Taylor and Ryan* for their participation. Special thanks extended to Joey; without him, this article would not exist.
