We should pity (some of) the incels
Western security agencies are worrying about a new threat — from incels, male “involuntary celibates”. Incels made it into July’s update to the British government’s counterterror strategy. US and Canadian intelligence services were already fretting. Killer incels emerged as a phenomenon in 2014, when Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old virgin, murdered six people in California in “retribution”, he wrote, because he felt rejected by women.
A few incels are indeed dangerous misogynists. However, there’s a much bigger and growing group of unseen incels who live in harmless frustrated misery. We should worry about them too.
The easiest place to find incels is a bizarre cranny of the online “manosphere”. Users of incel websites believe women are the dominant sex. They lament that women are only attracted to good-looking, tall, Alpha males — “Chads”, in incel vernacular. Incels themselves feel too ugly or short — “zetas”, in their own estimation — to possess “SMV” (sexual market value). Many incels are virgins. Lots have never been kissed.
The norm on these forums is a misogyny that blames inceldom on women. Some incels claim a “right to sex”, meaning that women should be redistributed from Chads to them. But since few incels are politically active, this is a wish, not a policy platform. Incels egg each other on to “blackpill”, meaning to accept their own sexual inferiority as unalterable. Talk of suicide is common and often encouraged, notes Miriam Lindner, a psychologist at Harvard, in her award-winning new academic paper on incels.
Crucially though, these misogynistic sites attract only “tens of thousands” of angry, self-identifying male incels, as estimated by criminologist Lisa Sugiura in her 2021 book The Incel Rebellion. This group presumably includes the incels who killed nearly 50 people in the US and Canada between 2014 and 2019. That’s a terrible toll, but it’s dwarfed by the nearly 1,700 killings of women by their intimate partners in the US in 2021 alone. In other words, the greatest risk to women is from the men they do sleep with.
Beyond the tiny group of incels who visit these sites, there must be tens of millions of involuntary celibates who never go there. The overwhelming majority probably don’t hate women. They might be your innocuous neighbours or colleagues. And they are proliferating. Whereas old people traditionally worry that the young are “oversexed”, the new generation appears undersexed.
In China and India, abortion of girls and some female infanticide have created what Lindner calls “a staggering excess of 70 million men who will be unable to find a female partner”. In the US in 2019, 28 per cent of young men hadn’t had sex with a woman in a year, up from about 10 per cent a decade earlier, reports the General Social Survey run from the University of Chicago. In a national survey of Japanese aged 18-34 in 2016, 42 per cent of men reported being virgins.
Part of the problem could be dating websites. Rather than leading to sex, they may be replacing sex: users can get their kicks flirting online without ever meeting anyone in real life.
Lindner identifies a bigger trigger for inceldom: female autonomy. Now that women can have good careers, are often happily single and less likely to be exclusively heterosexual, many don’t need men — certainly not low-status men. Lindner cites evidence that females are sexually pickier than males. In one study, “women rated 80 per cent of men’s attractiveness as below average”. Those women who want casual sex tend to seek it among the handsome, well-paid, well-educated “Chads”. One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.
The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview. While women are by no means socially dominant, increasingly empowered women do tend to shun low-status males.
The typical incel response isn’t murder but misery. In a poll on the incel.co forum, 68 per cent of respondents reported experiencing “long-lasting” depression. An exacerbating factor is that “many incels are thought to be on the autistic spectrum”, notes Sugiura. “It is unfair to suggest the whole incel community is centred towards violence and hatred,” she writes, “when it is mostly concentrated on self-loathing.”
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This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Simon Kuper
